Maria's Quilt: the Dance of a Quilter - Midnight Minuet

It is my turn to introduce my quilt I made for the long-arm quilting gallery at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham. How many times I learned that I should trust my first instinct, but I always think, rationalize. This was a fine example of it.

Maria Laza-Bihari: Midnight Minuet

When I started to work with the challenge fabrics, thinking through colour combinations my first reaction was to dig out an old project, as it had all the colours I had in mind: red, purple and green. It was a variation of the Storm at Sea Pattern which I fell in love with a long time ago. But this project had been prepared for hand-piecing and all the pieces were cut in centimetres! I had a look at it and discarded the idea, as it would have been a very time consuming project and this time I wanted to concentrate on the quilting and not the piecing. I took another direction and I played with several ideas, based on sashiko patterns. Days of drawing, designing and finally one morning I woke up with the IDEA. Let's not go into details otherwise I will never finish this blog. One thing is sure Equilter and My Blue Bamboo benefitted from my search for the perfect fabrics. Unfortunately none of them worked well in this design with the challenge fabrics. The outcome was a few interesting projects for the future and of course plenty of beautiful fabrics in my drawers, but concerning the challenge I was back to square one or should I say back to my first instinct, the old Storm at Sea variation. I always wanted to finish it and now everything pointed in this direction. Once I was sure, it went "fairly quickly". All I needed was to sew day and night (as the deadline and my holiday were coming closer) and to take over the living-room floor as a design board. Of course I wouldn't have been able to do this without my family's patience and understanding. I have to acknowledge they were very supportive or maybe just worried that we'd miss our holiday ?! The quilting still was ahead of me. I wanted to stitch in the ditch to emphasize the circles and turn these secondary patterns into the main focus and then fill up with free-hand quilting. I was very excited as this was my first SID on the long-arm quilting machine. It was nice to see how the circles came alive under my fingers. I couldn't finish the quilting completely before it went to Birmingham, I still need to do the free-hand quilting. It was a compromise, as I don't think my family would have accepted if I had cancelled our holiday. I promise I will post a photo of my quilt in our blog, once it is finished. Until then you can look at the photo, taken in Birmingham.

One more thing; I have to thank Marybeth for the name of my quilt, "Midnight Minuet" . It represents the whole story of my quilt.