Creative Magic at our Guild Design Session

As quilters are making, very often stray quilt blocks accumulate - blocks that are slightly off, blocks that don’t end up being made into a quilt, or blocks that lose their interest for the quilter. These are commonly known as “orphan blocks” and at a recent meeting my guild hosted a collaborative design session to jump start a bunch of charity quilts with a large collection of unused quilt blocks gathered from our guild members.

When I first walked into the room, it felt like a magical wonderland of quilty goodness! There were quilt blocks and quilts in progress on every table and design wall, and so much energy buzzing through the air.

I found it fascinating and motivating to see all the different colors and shapes different quilters selected out of the piles and piles of blocks available - it felt like there was creative magic in the air, and I felt a sense of abundance - there was plenty of material and inspiration for everyone who wanted to play.

My friend Elle’s color palettes drew my eye as always - it was so fun to see the beauty taking shape on her table:

My friend Miriam sketched an played with several possibilities, with lots of rich batik fabrics:

And I was drawn to this one block that had blues and grays. When I saw it in the pile, I felt a strong sense of “ooo yes!” and pulled it out. I tried a few other concepts (black and white with a pop of citrus, bright rainbow), but it was the gray and blue that really called to me. I quickly found and assembled a range of blocks that felt like they both fit and added to the original story of that gray and blue block (which is the one that looks like a diamond shape in the upper left of the photo):

While playing with layout, I was thinking about distributing the different shapes and forms around the quilt to build a sense of rhythm and repetition. It is still very much a work in progress, but I expect I’ll commit to a layout and have a quilt top before too long.

This wasn’t our guild’s first time hosting a session like this, but it was my first time attending. I’m already looking forward to the next one, and also wondering about how I might host something similar here in Frederick. For me this was a great antidote to the way quilting has in some ways become a more solitary practice, despite a rich and layered history of quilting as community gathering, collaboration, and generation.