Inspiration Struck!

In the middle of that artist’s holiday, inspiration struck me! I was looking through a book called Quilted Planet, when a certain quilt struck my fancy.

It really just brought to mind an old idea I had, based on the words at the end of the poem in John 1 “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it.” I’d had in mind a cross (for the series The Signature of Jesus) shining in the darkness. When I see a quilt that inspires me, in general I just keep the idea in the back of my mind, and on purpose, I don’t go back and look at it, so I will be doing my own work.

I took from this quilt the idea of using rectangles as a construction unit. And this time I even wanted them to be all the same size, so I found a template that would work, and got out my big box of scraps, and cut out a million rectangles. All different colors for the cross, and a variety of neutrals, shading from beige to gray to black for the background. I worked quite a while on this piece on the design wall, and it was not coming out at all what I envisioned it to be. I knew it was a problem of values, but sometimes I get stuck on the fabric and I don’t want to change. I almost gave up, but then I found my original inspiration, and tried one more time. I cut out a lot more light and dark squares, and ta da! I am very pleased with the outcome.

I started quilting it, and then, AS USUAL, struck a road block. I did not know how I was going to quilt it. Fortunately, I had another quilt waiting in the wings for some finishing quilting, so I got that out and completely finished it!

And in the meantime, I decided on a simple plan for quilting the dark cross. Don’t you just love quilting?