Angled: A Modern Meets Modern Mini Quilt

January 7, 2022

Towards the end of 2021, the International Quilt Museum issued a challenge in conjunction with their exhibit, Modern Meets Modern. They asked participants to create a 16″ square mini quilt in response to one or more inspiration quilts, and Angled is my interpretation. You can learn more about the challenge parameters here.

The Catalyst Quilts

The four historic catalyst quilts all have elements that relate to the Modern Quilting Movement of today. The International Quilt Museum has a page of information on each quilt with much clearer pictures too! It was wonderful to be able to zoom in on the quilts to get a better idea of the construction methods used for each quilt.

Links to the Quilts

Design

I wanted my interpretation to draw from all four catalyst quilts, and I started by considering the overall composition of the quilts. Portions of each quilt or the overall composition divided space into fourths. The Carpenter’s Square contains four main motifs. The dominant blocks in Ocean Waves and the negative space of the Sunflower quilt divide space to create an X formation. Four patch blocks make up the blocks of the Four Patch Variation Quilt.

My interpretation is divided into unequal quarters surrounding 1/8″ wide strips pieced in an X formation. The narrow line reflects the narrow lines found in the Carpenter’s Square Quilt and the area of negative space is reminiscent of the negative space used in the Sunflower quilt.

The colors for the quilt are inspired primarily from the Ocean Waves Quilt

This mini quilt is a block based design set on point. Most of the blocks are variations on the half square triangle that is a major motif in the Ocean Waves quilt. In addition to plain squares and rectangles that add some negative space to the composition, there are four main piecing styles in the blocks making up the quilt:

Traditional half square triangle (traditionally pieced)
Half square triangle with an inner triangle- Some are constructed with the background fabric in the inner triangle and others have the background fabric around the edge to give two looks to the same construction method. (foundation paper pieced)
Narrow line half square triangle- This block and the linear form from the previous block also reflect the use of line seen in the Carpenter’s Square quilt. (foundation paper pieced
Four Patch blocks that draw on the Four Patch Variation Quilt. (traditionally pieced)

Construction

The Quilt top was pieced using full blocks, and I then trimmed it down a bit before basting and quilting it. I knew that I wanted to quilt this mini fairly heavily which would cause the quilt to become a bit smaller as I quilted. To account for this I left about an inch extra on each side so I could trim it to an exact 16″ square right before binding the project.

All of the quilting for this project was done with a walking foot on a domestic sewing machine. I used a coordinating 40wt orange along either side of the 1/8″ wide lines and 50wt dark blue on the background.

To bind the mini quilt, I chose to use a mix of fabrics used in the piecing of the quilt top. A pieced bias binding technique is also used in the Four Patch catalyst quilt.