100 Days of Dice Compositions: Week 10 - Mod Pop Purple Magic

 

It's hard to believe this is my 10th consecutive Dice Composition! This week's layout may have taken an extra day to finetune, but I sure had fun playing at every stage of the quilt design process!

64/100: Roll Dice and Pull Fabrics

Purple play ahead as inspired by a Third Plus design guide.
Let's see what this purple palette inspires me to create this week...

65/100: Start Layout and Stamp Fabrics

Progress on this week's Thirds Plus Composition:

Purple...✔️

Thirds...✔️

Plus...✔️

Two of the purple fabrics were used to clean up excess paint and read mostly as a solid with a bit of mottling. I couldn't resist stamping + sign patterns using my new foam stamps from ArtFoamies.

66/100: More Mark-Making and Rework Layout

Making purple progress including:

💜 Doodling details with Uniball Signo pen

💜 Swapping out one of the background fabrics for this commercial batik which provided a bit more of a resting area for the viewer's eye as compared to the bold fauxbori stripes.

💜 Stamping with a coordinating ArtFoamies stamp and Color Shift paints. Even though I ordered theses stamps a week ago and I totally forgot that I had that batik in my stash. I am impressed at how well they coordinate!

I cut out smaller swatches of the + sign prints and will play more with layout. As I was editing the photos to post, I noticed that the background was blending together. On a whim, I grabbed a strip of black fabric and placed it beween the two background fabrics. Wow...that small pop of black really provided contrast and tied in with the printed black accents.

67/100: Refine Composition and Top Stitch Edges

I didn't love all the excess negative space behind each of the stamped asterisks so I started out by trimming more closely to the stamp with just a thin border of black fabric. I had one extra asterisk so if I didn't like it I had a back up and could always stamp more.

The asterisk motif was very mid century modern, so I researched additional design inspiration from my Mod Pop Pinterest board. The discarded parchment paper backing from Wonder Under was used to freehand cut out templates to audition shapes, scale, and placement before cutting into my marked fabrics. Nuclear rings was another motif seen in several of the pins and matched a stamped print using my deodorant container. The various elements were layered and positioned into a variety of configurations which you can see below on the left side. The nuclear rings were a very similar scale as the asterisks, and so I opted to eliminate them from the composition as I opted for the composition on the right below.

Once everything was fused into position, I outlined all the elements with free-motion quilting using coordinating Aurifil threads.

Time to celebrate completing 2/3rds of this 100 Day Project!!

68/100: Hand Embroidery

"We are all of us stars, and we deserve to twinkle."

-Marilyn Monroe

Having fun stitching some twinkle into this week's Dice Composition...

69/100: More Hand Embroidery

Tonight I learned a new embroidery stitch: the pistil stitch aka an elongated french knot! Stitching it made for a fun evening of hand embroidery to fill in a few last areas on this week's Dice Composition.

70/100: Finish and Blog

This fun print was pulled out as a possible background fabric for use with this week's composition. While it didn't make the cut for the quilt top, I set it aside for the quilt back! I used some of the trimmed bits from the front to frame the quilt label.

And here is the finished quilt: Mod Pop Purple Magic.

"Mod Pop Purple Magic" Finishes 12" x 12"

Personal Critique:

• A monochromatic purple color scheme was used with black and white accents.
• The large purple shapes serve as a focal point thanks to their position along the third mark, larger scale, outline in contrasting black, and more vibrant colors.
• Repetition of the + signs stamped and stitched into two of the large shapes, stacked left rectangles as well as the asterisk motif (stamped, stitched, and printed background) help move the eye around the composition.
• A variety of techniques and materials were used to create texture: doodling, stamping, selection of commercial batik prints, hand embroidered stitches, and solid black outlines.

I really enjoyed incorporating Mid Century Modern elements and shapes to create this whimsical composition. I received several comments that it reminded them of The Jetsons cartoon, a Hanna-Barbera cartoon about family life in the 21st century (approximately 2062--which is a little over 40 years away). 

And while it is certainly fun to look ahead and imagine what our lives will look like that far into the future, I will be setting my sights on next week as I dream up the next Dice Composition featuring a new color and layout.