Longview Quilt Top

A little quilt top. The colors are just so perfect for this project, but I didn't put 2 and 2 together until this whiplash comp.

A few years ago I made a large quilt that had both white and dark blue in it. I was afraid that the blue was going to run into the white, so I bought some special laundry sheets designed to catch dye. They worked, and the laundry sheets came out blue-ish. Cool, I thought, a blue sheet, and I saved it. I've been using those sheets on all my suspect loads for a while now, always saving the resulting colored sheet. They have a fiber make up that feels somewhere in between paper and cotton. Sometimes I am totally surprised by the color that comes out of my clothes. Sometimes (as with the new hot pink beach towels), I wait excitedly to see how bright the sheet will turn. Now, I have many different colored sheets in three basic color groups: yellow, blue, and red. I used these for the quilt.

I've wanted to make this quilt for months--since the little corn and soy seedling starting sprouting up on the farms the line the highway. The flat, farm landscape that surrounds me is more incredibly beautiful than I ever thought it could be. The lack of topographical features brings smaller details to the landscape's foreground, and as I drive by I am in love with the colors the different plant stalks turn when the sun hits them. The gray and blue and purple of the sky against the golds are greens of the fields always amazes me. More than that, it amazes me that it is so amazing because I thought that in the midwest I'd find nothing but flat and brown. It's totally beautiful, and it changes with each season the same way that a forest would.


Anyway, I thought I would make this design a much bigger quilt, say maybe 3 feet by 4 feet, but I was never able to find just the right colors. When I sat down with my laundry sheets to begin the whiplash project, I was thinking that I would make a traditional quilt block, but use this material instead of cotton cloth. A quick errand in the next town over via a country road reminded me of the quilt I wanted to make, and I quickly realized that my laundry sheets were the perfect colors. They are a beautiful assortment of subtly varied golds, blues, and grays. Sometimes stuff just works.

I'm very happy with it, and I'm very happy here.