Lotta Jansdotter quilt, part one: the background

When I first came to modern quilting fabrics (in a long roundabout way) I was not entirely sold on Lotta Jansdotter. This was the time of Bella, and my ambivalence was mostly based on that bird... And it is so different from, well, everything else out there. And that takes some getting used to.

By the time her third collection, Glimma,  was released I was much more educated, exposed, converted, and spending time thinking about fabric in a more, um, thoughtful way (or perhaps obsessive?). Anyway, more able to define what I liked about fabrics.



And what I liked are wonky stripes. Which Glimma has. And Bella, too, and her first collection, too, has Lina, queen of stripes (in my opinion - second are the stripes from Sympatico by Michelle Engel Bencsko - so great!) I have put a lot of thought into stripes - I am assembling a quilt from stripes (very slowly - and have been for a long time, though this is I think, the first mention of it here)... and one thing I like about Lotta Jansdotter's prints is that many of them are stripes that aren't exactly stripes - lines that aren't linear or designs that are ordered in imperfect rows.... Which is the sort of thing one needs when one is trying to make a quilt from one sort of fabric while trying to keep it from being too much the same.

I bought Lina and Kita (in blueberry) for different purposes (more on that later - much later, that's a whole other quilt!), but could not help thinking they would be great together. And the more I thought about it, and the organic shapes they are and form and unform and reform when cut apart and moved together again. I decided on a woven 9 patch block with these semi-linear fabrics.

like so.

But just blue and pink would be boring, so I looked at the collections and chose two other fabrics - Redig in orange from Bella (for a warm color) and Drake in flannel from Glimma (for a cool, but not dark color - my rational is that orange is dark, but the pink is light, so in order to balance the block, the other cool color must also be tonal light).

And then I planned my (twin sized) quilt! (Drafted with MS Paint...)

and... the finished quilt looks nothing like this!

Stay tuned for part two - the actual quilt!