The Eye of the Storm Quilt

I just realized last night that I never shared the details of this quilt with y'all! And it's front and center every time I have shared photos of my new office. So, here is the story of the Eye of the Storm quilt.

I don't have many photos of the early stages of this quilt because my old phone suffered a catastrophic failure earlier this year. It died a horrible death, and we could not retrieve any photos from the phone (moral of the story, back 'em up if you can).

All the fabrics for the quilt top are from recycled t-shirts in the 12 colors of the red/yellow/blue color system plus white. I used my die cutter to make hexagons from the colors and the corresponding triangles from white. I began piecing this together at our Chicago Modern Quilt Guild retreat - that's my late (beloved, and sorely missed) BERNINA 1080 in the photo above. First steps were piecing the triangles on each side of the hexies.

Once I finished attaching the triangles I was ready for layout! Layout happened at yet another CMQG retreat (I think I worked on this through an entire year's worth of retreats).

I had absolutely NO plans, ideas, or preconceived notions of how this project was going to come together. I didn't even know what size it would end up! My only plan was to use as many of the pieces as I could to create a quilt. The layout was kind of spontaneous. Instead of mixing all the colors together or laying them out randomly, I chose to put red in the center (of course, because it is my favorite color!) and loosely follow color-order out from there.

I started to piece the rows together at that retreat, and finished the rows at home.

Yet another CMQG retreat and the rows are finally coming together.

And I finished the top! Once it was sewn together, it became pretty clear that the quilt looked a lot like Doppler radar of a large storm. One friend even though this was exactly how Predator sees the world. 

I decided to go with the Doppler radar theme, it fit really well. I chose to quilt outward from one of the red hexies to represent the eye of the storm. I quilted a simple snowflake looking shape in the center of the eye. 

After finishing with a facing, the quilt measures 50" wide by 56" long. 

I have to admit, I didn't care too much for this quilt after I finished it. I entered it into the QuiltCon show at the end of 2016, and was a bit disappointed that it was not accepted. I think it had a lot to do with having worked for so long on this quilt! At any rate, I put it away right after the holidays and didn't look at it for many months.

Recently this quilt has moved into my newly remodeled sewing studio and lives right over my desk. It's really grown on me, and I have enjoyed it as a daily companion - I do really love this quilt!

Isn't it funny how something you work so hard on making can seem like a big disappointment at first, but then end up being something you absolutely love?