The inspiration for the design came from a wallpaper by Lucienne Day, one of my favorite mid-century pattern designers. The wallpaper was similarly made up of blocks of black, solid color, and more textured designs, which struck me as lending itself very readily to a pieced quilt. Rather than mimicking the textures of the squares in Day’s design (the reference photo I had was too small anyway), I picked fabrics with gridded and crosshatched designs that would echo the piecing pattern (that’s what the text in the magazine should say—a line got dropped from the intro). For such a simple quilt, I’m pleased with how much depth the prints lent.
Clearly I had squares on the brain when I was working on this issue. For this Wool Tiles Pillow, I went for a looser, more freehand look. I always like wool projects that only need bits and pieces, since I can never seem to find yardage of nice wool when I need it.
One of the fun features in this issue is a “Pillow Fight” challenge, for which fellow Stitch contributors Carol Zentgraf and April Moffatt and I each came up with a pillow using fabric designed by Anna Bondoc in the course of a Cloth Paper Scissors series. In the article I describe how I tried to play “fabric whisperer” and let the fabric speak to me—see what it said to the other designers and get patterns for all three pillows and plenty more in the Winter issue of Stitch!
