100 Days of Dice Compositions: Week 9 - LEGO Dots & Lots of Knots

This week I circled back to the color red and a grid design guide for an exciting new Dice Composition. Read on to learn more about my inspiration, process, and progress...

57/100: Roll Dice and Pull Fabrics

Pulling red hot circles and dots to create week's dice composition using a grid design!!

58/100: Create More Mark-Making Prints and Fuse with Pellon 805

Had fun marking a few new fabrics to add to this week's mix:

• Stamping with tongue depressors and lego plates (left and middle photo)
• Using a hotel key card and rubber comb to scrape on fabric paint thanks to today's Fantastic Fusion workshop with Lisa Walton.

Everything has been fused with Pellon 805/Wonder Under. Let the grid play start tomorrow!!

59/100: Cut Fabrics and Create Initial Grid Layout

"You just stay the course, and do what it is that you do, and grow while you're doing it. Eventually it will either come full circle, or at least you'll go to bed at night happy."

-Jon Bon Jovi, American singer/songwriter

 

60/100: Refine Grid Layout

"The grid system is an aid, not a guarantee. It permits a number of possible uses and each designer can look for a solution appropiate to his personal style. But one must learn how to use the grid; it is an art that requires practice."

-Josef Muller-Brockmann, Swiss graphic designer, author, and educator

Despite a wicked migraine that knocked me out for the afternoon and evening, I managed to rally and head into the studio to play with the layout. My goal was to break up the grid formation by manipulating each square through trimming and layering with contrasting prints. I was definitely inspired by Lisa's Fantastic Fusion class as little bits were trimmed off and later added onto other modules. The left layout below is how it looked the entire time I was playing with design. After taking a photo to post, I wondered what it might look like rotated 90-degrees. I really liked having the light flower towards the top and the dark, large square's weight towards the bottom (middle). Again, I wanted more of the darker bits towards the bottom, so I rearranged the modules a bit. I'll revisit tomorrow with fresh eyes before fusing everything into place...

61/100: Add Machine Quilted Textures

Thankfully I was feeling much better today to stitch layers of quilted textures today!

Before fusing all the elements into place, I stitched red gridlines into the background. Red Aurifil 28wt was stitched using the lines on the organic gridded background. Initially the spacing was approximately 1" apart but they were hard to see once I laid the elements back on top. So more red lines were stitched to create a more dense grid.

After fusing all the modules into place, free-motion quilting was added in and around each element using 50wt Aurifil in white, black, and red. I especially love the dense zig zag background fills around the circles to create a faux trapunto look!

Since most of the threads matched the background elements, it is difficul to gauge just how much stitching was done until you look at the backside.

62/100: Add Hand-Embroidered Texures

"I am an artist because the knot is so powerful I just can not, nor want to be, anything else or do anything else."

--Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Swiss-American psychiatrist and author

Once again, I woke up with a nasty migraine that didn't resolve until the late afternoon. Thankfully I was able to recover on the couch with some meditative hand embroidery which yielded incredible texture including:

• 141 colonial knots
• 19 plus signs

63/100: Trim, Face, Label, Photograph, and Blog

This morning I texted my mother to brainstorm quilt titles. I rattled off a list of ideas: LEGO, knots, circles, dots, red, black, white, and grid. As soon as I typed the list, I recognized the rhyme of dots and knots. Together we refined the title to LEGO DOTS & LOTS of KNOTS. She suggested capitalizing the words containing OTS and I had fun adding a pop of red to those dots as I made the label! A fat quarter of Michael Miller's Hash Dot made for a perfect quilt back/facing strips as it was red and contained both dots and gridlines. 

Here is the finished front:

LEGO DOTS & LOTS of KNOTS, Finishes 12" x 12"

Personal Critique:

This quilt features a high contrast color combination of red, white, and black. While the quilt features two basic shapes (circles/dots and lines), they are repeated using different scales (large, medium, and small circles, thick and thin lines). Moreover, they are combined to create different patterns: a flower, straight vs. more irregularly spaced lines and grids, parallel lines and segments, zig zags, and plus signs. A variety of textures are featured including:

• painted grids, lines, and dots
• organic grid black and white background fabric
• machine stitched textures to create grids (red grid background and between the rows/columns of dots) as well as the super dense background fill which helps the unquilted circles pop
• hand-embroidered knots and plus signs

All in all, I am really pleased with this finished Dice Composition as it has a lot of energy and interesting details to move the eye around.