A Prairie Home Quilts

My Liberated Amish Challenge quilt top is done.  I definitely liberated the colors and the setting.  Hahaha.  Tonya’s challenge was for us to pick a quilt from the book Amish Abstractions or from the photos on the Browns’ website to “liberate.”  We were to add words — done Tonya-style — to the front of the quilt also. After much deliberation, I chose this quilt for inspiration.  As you can see from the photo of the original quilt, there was no matchy-matchy color scheme going on.  What was the original quilter thinking when she put these colors together?  The quilt is crib-sized and the HST blocks must be only about 3″.  Did she just want to use up her smallest scraps?  Did she choose her favorite colors no matter how they looked together?  Maybe it’s us — our culture — our time in history that’s decreed color palettes have to be so matchy-matchy?

So how did I choose the colors for my quilt?  I didn’t have any solids so I had to buy fabric, but I needed to narrow down my choices because I just kept adding more and more fabric to the online cart.  I noticed that the many names of the colors where names of fruits and vegetables so I added all those to my cart.  At first there were too many greens so I took out all the vegetables and left just the fruit.  The names of the fruits were also the inspiration for my words.

The colors are bright and bold.  Something I’m drawn to.  The center setting was a challenge.  Several people commented about the photo of my setting that combined the squares and straight furrows — something that hadn’t even occurred to me — combining them.  So thank you!  That was all the inspiration I needed to truly liberate the setting in the original quilt into something different.  Everything else just seemed somewhat predictable or something…  This is different — original — and I like it.

I do have a difficult time with the “cut without using rulers and doing the whole free-pieced blocks” thing.  My mind screams “precise, straight, precision, neat, orderly” even though I’m really rarely any of those things in real life.  I’m sure this is just a reflection of my rebellious heart trying to let loose over the shouting in my head though.  Maybe with some more practical experience my heart could win my mind over because I do like liberated quilts and would like to try making a few more.

To be truly ruled by my heart rather than my mind…  What would that look like I wonder?