Radiant Triangles

I am a sucker for a challenge. Even if it’s kind of silly (I once entered a Friendship Bracelet Quilt Challenge). The Pantone Color of the Year Quilt Challenge over at On the Windy Side didn’t sound silly, it sounded really fun. Purple is my very favorite color. We have a purple chair in our living room. I got purple towels for a wedding gift. So a challenge using a color that was my FAVORITE COLOR EVER is not one that I would pass up.

My inspiration was a piece of Joel Dewberry’s Ironwork in Lilac from Aviary 2 that I had gotten in a Hawthorne Threads scrap pack. I pulled out every piece of purplish plum from my stash and my solid scrap bin. Last year I attended a workshop with Bill Kerr from Modern Quilt Studio. He taught us that not every fabric in a quilt had to be matchy-matchy (my words, not his) with every other fabric in a quilt. He gave an analogy that quilt fabrics are like people at a dinner party. You wouldn’t want to host a party where the guests were all too similar (boring), nor would you want to host a dinner party where the guests were all too different (chaos). The trick, he said, is to make sure that each person/fabric had at least one other person/fabric to talk to. So, after I used colors similar to the ones found in the Joel Dewberry print, I started adding friends.

I used my Tri-Recs ruler to help me draw the triangles on parchment paper. Once I had the outlines marked, I used a regular ruler to create triangles of different sizes within. Then, I used the parchment outlines as my foundation for paper piecing. I used my solid scrap bin and a few strips I cut out of my purple/orchid/plum solids and shot cottons. I know I used about 20 different fabrics in this pillow. This is the pillow that replaced the one I talked about in the last post. I probably should have taken a picture of it, but I decided to let the trash man take it with one last little pat from me. Dumb, I know. I'm just a little sentimental.