Quilts and Books

Back in May I blogged here about a quilt I was working on that was made up of 1600 2-inch squares. At that time the top was finished, but hadn't been quilted. I finished the quilt, but never got around to posting pictures of it here. And meanwhile, just the other day I learned something very interesting that really enhanced -- for me -- the meaning of this quilt. To recap: Last summer I saw this graphic that was to be used as the logo for my professional association during the 2010/2011 year: To put it simply, I fell in love with it and became obsessed with using it as the basis for a quilt. I received permission from AALL  to exhibit any quilt I would make (as long as they received credit) and they went so far as to ask me to bring it to Philadelphia last weekend for our annual meeting. Ouch. That meant I had a deadline. I worked like a dog for 6 weeks from Easter through the first week of June to finish it. Here is the finished quilt. You can see that I tweaked the design...

Last summer I saw this logo: All I could see were those pretty colors and the modern, pixelated design. Color gone wild! I wrote to AALL and asked for permission to turn their logo into a quilt. They said Yes! So I dug into my stash (see photo of said stash in sidebar to right) and started cutting squares. I cut and I cut and I cut. Then I began sticking them up on my design wall. Only I did them in reverse (red on the left, blue on the right--hot to cold). And when I was happy I started sewing them together in pairs very carefully to keep them in the right order. The pairs would be sewn in to small sections and the small sections into large sections... well, you get the idea. It looked like this: 2-inch squares in a setting of 40 rows by 40 rows. That's 1600 squares. The seam allowances shrink the finished squares down to 1.5 inches. The final quilt will be 60" x 60". Here's the top all finished: And here's that logo again: My thanks to the American A...