In previous posts I’ve mentioned that I love words and language.  For a long time I had an idea of making a quilt that had the look and feel of a newspaper page.  For several months I collected fabric with text and interesting images and then began drawing up a pattern on large sheets of 1″ graph paper.

Once the pattern was done I began the fun work of cutting out the pieces.  I paid attention to colour balance and made sure that repeat pieces weren’t too close together.   Each piece was labelled with a number that corresponded with the graph paper pattern, then trimmed with a narrow cream border.

Assembly took place at the Denman Quilters’ Retreat on Thetis Island, in 2014.  Most of the blocks went together easily and in a logical sequence.  With some I had to sit back and think ‘what goes where, and when?’  Gradually it came together, but it felt to me that something was missing.  Fortunately there was enough leftover red text fabric to add a border.

The backing fabric was narrow and required a seam.  To disguise the seam I used leftover strips from the front of the quilt.    If you enlarge the photo of the backing you’ll see that the left side black/cream is all one piece but the right side black/cream is made of many horizontal strips sewn together.  Because the print is so small those seams appear less obvious.

The quilting is a series of fractured, random straight lines.  I thought this would be quick and easy, but soon found that that was not the case and I had to keep adding lines to make sure that the unquilted spaces weren’t too large.  The border is plain black, attached by machine and finished by hand.  The finished size is 62″ x 72″.

While there are things that I would do differently, I was really pleased with how this quilt turned out.  There’s a large stack of text fabric in my stash and a companion quilt is not out of the question.  Here are photos of the front and back of Front Page.

Thanks for reading.