Rainbow Constellation

This year for the first time my guild, the DC Modern Quilt Guild, participated in a cross-country mini quilt swap with three other guilds from around the United States. The swap was called SEWN: South East West North, and the participating guilds along with ours were Orlando, Denver, and Chicago. The theme for the swap was Abstract, and the organizers provided us with the Tate definition of abstract art as a starting point for exploration.

My swap partner likes black and white, so I perused around the Tate abstract holdings just to get a feel for some general ideas. But then I fell in love with one piece, and it became the inspiration for my mini quilt! The piece is called Constellation According to the Laws of Chance by Jean Arp (click the image for more information)

The piece is a painted wooden relief with a mix of paint and wood shapes. Arp had a craftsperson carve the white wooden shapes for him so they would be left up to chance, then he created the resulting composition. I loved this idea of leaving pieces of a work up to chance, so I set out to create something in a similar style to Arp’s piece, but with my own quilty spin.

To start, I cut a piece of white fabric in roughly the size and shape I wanted, then I fused HeatnBond lite to the back of a piece of black fabric. To emulate Arp’s idea of having the shapes be up to chance and out of my control, I showed my daughter (age 7) the inspiration piece, then asked her to draw some organic shapes on the HeatnBond side of the black fabric:

I wanted to include an additional element of chance, so my daughter gleefully dropped black and white pebbles on to the background fabric for me to determine where each color would be situated on the background

Here is how they landed (we had to re-drop a few that fell out of bounds!):

When I started playing with placing the shapes, several of them felt too small for the scale of the piece, so I traced larger shapes around them on the leftover black fabric to mimic the shape but make it bigger. I wanted the white pieces to have some depth to them, to appear like they were standing out more like the wooden shapes in Arp’s piece, so I chose to wrap white fabric around the black shapes:

I peeled off the HeatnBond papers and pressed each shape into place, then quilted over the whole composition in a 3/8” grid with 28wt rainbow variegated thread, since my partner mentioned liking all the colors in addition to black and white. Here is the result:

And a few close-ups of the quilting:

I pieced the backing with a few favorite black and white prints (my partner’s name and guild info are scratched out):

Overall participating in the swap was very fun and intriguing! I haven’t felt brave enough to participate in quilt swaps prior to this (I’ve done pouch swaps and other quilted items, but never a quilt!) and I think the hook of the abstract theme was perfect for my first swap. It gave me a starting point and a confidence in what I was doing, beyond just “make a pretty quilt your partner will like” (which sounds intimidating to me!!!).