Journey quilt series

The Journey series of quilts was started when I was trying to get a brave about travelling. The impetus was someone's remark (on AQL?) about randomness, and I got to thinking about how random events tend to average out if there are enough of them, and wondered how this actually would look in a quilt, if the element of chance applied to which bit of cloth you sewed on next. How would you get truly random? Some people cut their leftover fabric into strips, then pull them at random out of a bag. So I set about gathering a bag of strips.The first piece, still unfinished (it's backed but I can't quite decide about the quilting) is now called Journey of a Lifetime. I made a bagful of strips (3cm to 7cm wide, some angled) of shot silks, and another of recycled red silks, to be stitch 'n' flipped onto strips of (prewashed) domette.

To "choose" which strip to use next I tossed a coin - heads for red, tails for colour - then pulled any old piece out of the bag. When the toss came up same again, I inserted a narrow, folded strip of a plaid silk. Working on several of the long strips allowed for chain piecing.

The width of the foundation strips was carefully chosen, but their order in the finished quilt was decided on the basis of the flow of colour. And when it was laid out, the random events had indeed tended to the average - it looked dull! - hence the stabs of dark blue, added before sewing the strips together. It's those bits of darkness that are making the problem for deciding how to quilt it.

While pondering this important question I did a little rummaging in the drawerful of old projects and found lots of bits of fabric printed in a class years ago, using bubble wrap and monoprinting and ends of thread spools and bits of cardboard, as you do. It was the work of moments to reduce them to strips and find some small dark plaids from recycled shirts. The title Desert Journey soon emerged for this piece. To impose randomness I used a throw of the dice, after sorting the strips into six bags. The pieces of lime green print on black background went into a bag on their own - but ran out halfway up and I needed to find something else a bit edgy for the rest. This kind of shift is something to use deliberately another time.

The photo shows ragged edges but the quilt has been finished. I quilted it closely in sand-coloured threads, with the feed dogs up and a regular presser foot. The lines of stitching run in parallel swoops that echo and amplify the shapes of the solid inserts (these are silk). The edges of the quilt are faced and turned to the back. They're stepped at top and bottom, following the ends of the vertical strips, and smooth on the sides.

Both those quilts are about 80cm x 110 cm, but the third random quilt is smaller. It uses scraps from "Journey in the Midnight Garden", which I'll write about another time. This small piece, still unfinished because I can't decide on the quilting [is there a theme here?] has no title yet. Maybe that's what's holding it back?

In the lower left you can see the backing and the stepped ending of the strips. By now I was putting the long strips together in a different way. At first I'd overlapped them, turned the edge under, and handstitched, using a ladder stitch. Here I machined around the edge and used those lines as a guide for machining the strips together.

It takes a while, as with any quilt, to select the fabrics and group them, but after that the randomness makes the sewing painless.