Project Quilting 16.4: Birthstone

This week's Project Quilting challenge theme was Birthstone, inviting participants to use the color of your birthstone as a guide for your project. With a January birthday, the Garnet is my birthstone, which come in a range of hues, with a deep red the most commonly associated color. I was pleasantly surprised to find lots of rich reds in my stash of designer fabrics from Fabmo.including silks and upholstery fabrics with a bit of sparkle power.

Garnet comes from the Latin word granatus for seed or grain and are frequently associated with the pomegranate fruit as these gemstones frequently resemble pomegranate seeds in color, size, and shape. While out on my neighborhood walk, I remembered that several of my neighbors had pomegranate shrubs and wondered if I might find some pomegranates to photograph for design inspiration. Well, I found one of my neighbor's bushes, but it was clearly well past peak pomegranate season as the color had faded significantly and the outer skin had cracked open to reveal the pomegranate seeds. The next day, the shrub had been pruned so I am so glad I was able to get thesee photos before it was too late!

Thankfully, I was able to find several pomegranate photos I had taken in previous years! 

I began by carving a 3" cross section of a pomegranate fruit, which required lots of rotating the block around and around in circles to carve out all those pomegranate seeds!

Here is one of several test prints I did on paper...

The next day, I drafted another 3" pomegranate block, inspired by the photos of the split open pomegranate fruit I had taken the day before. 

This motif was designed to print on the red fabric swatches, so I chose some reddish papers to do a few test prints. 

Excited by these initial prints, I couldn't resist printing a few fabric pomegranates next and was very tempted to just keep on printing, printing, printing more pomegranates!

The next day, I continued printing pomegranates onto a variety of designer swatches...and then hit pause as I percolated over layout options.

On Saturday afternoon, I started to assemble these into a quilt top during a co-working call. I joked with the others in the call that there was a good chance this project might shrink in size in order to finish before the Sunday deadline. Well, by Saturday night, I had a pieced top but had my doubts about the direction it was taking. So once again, I hit pause... 

And decided to start over by making a mini project that would be more manageable. So I went back to making more block prints that I trimmed and finished into snowball blocks using some of the leftover scraps from the earlier project. 

Here are the pieced snowball blocks ready for borders...

I picked up this green polka dot print the day before from Fabmo, but wasn't sure which was the right side. So I opted to use both sides to create partial seam spinning borders followed by a bit of quick stitch-in-the-ditch quilting, pillowcase finish, and another round of stitching to hold all 3 layers together. In less than 2 hours start to finish, I had a finished piece to submit. for the Birthstone Challenge. 

Block-Printed Pomegranate Patchwork, Finishes 12" x 12"

And here are the hand-carved stamps with the finished patchwork piece!

There is an upcoming art call that will provide me with a bit of motivation to revisit the other pomegranate patchwork top to decide how best to proceed with finishing it! Wish me luck!