Divestiture 2

I wrote earlier about my fiber and textile group's community service project to make art for a local children's agency.  I went through my piles of old quilts and found several to donate.  Here's a pair of quilts that I made to illustrate a concept.

I never did anything more with the concept, until today, so this post can be both a show-and-tell and a project lesson.

At the time I had recently acquired a huge pile of solid strips, which got to me in a convoluted way. Many years ago Caryl Bryer Fallert (now Fallert-Gentry) taught two week-long workshops at Quilt Surface Design Symposium.  Week one dealt with strip piecing, and all students had been asked to bring in a bunch of strips to contribute to a communal pile.  They apparently brought in way more than they were able to sew, because when week two rolled around and my workshop occurred, there was still a big pile of strips on the table.

Caryl said we were all welcome to use the strips, and I did -- in fact, it sent me down the road on a long series that I should write about sometime.  On Friday afternoon Caryl announced that she wasn't taking those #@%&* strips home with her, so if anybody wanted some, take them!  You know me well enough to know that I did, and I worked with them for several years.  Probably still have some stashed away somewhere in my studio.

So back to the project lesson.   Start by making five log cabin squares, all the same size.  I didn't own a digital camera at the time and therefore wasn't obsessively documenting process steps, so you'll have to take this part on faith.  My five log cabins had alternating logs of black and bright colors, with logs of varying widths.

Stack the blocks up in a pile and slice across them at an angle.  Carefully separate the two piles by an inch or so, keeping everything in the same orientation.  Take the top piece on one of the piles and move it to the bottom of the same pile. You now have five top halves and five bottom halves, but if you take the top pair off, they don't match one another.  Sew the pairs together.  Now you have five blocks, each with a fracture seam in the middle.

Press the blocks, shuffle them and stack them up again, with all the seams going vertically.  Slice across the pile on an angle, crossing the first seams.  Again, separate the two piles, move the top piece on one of the piles to the bottom, and sew the new pairs together.  You now have five blocks with two fractures in the middle.

Each block looks like this:

But since I had made five blocks, I got this little quilt plus a bigger quilt out of the project.

As I look at the pictures, I don't understand how I managed to get those different angles on the cuts.  There should have been only two slices in the entire project, so all the angles should have been the same.

Maybe I did the slicing in two separate batches.  Guess I'll have to deconstruct the photos and figure out what happened. And if I ever want to teach this technique I'll have to make a new sample with simpler planning. But not today.