Artquiltmaker Blog

I am not going to tell you the secrets of Chaos with a Twist. It will be well worth your while to take the class from Libs Elliott when she offers it. 

I talked about my design the other day. I could fiddle with it endlessly, both the design itself, the placement of the blocks and the colors. I will tell you one secret. Using a 10-side die can help the process. The YM is an avid Dungeons and Dragons player, so I thought there had to be at least one 10-side die in the house despite the fact that he hasn’t lived with us for several years. I rummaged through his night table, his desk drawers for one die. I found a lot of change, old gift cards, a multitude of pens and pencils, but no 10-sided die anywhere. 🙁

I went looking online and saw they all come in sets of ~7 to ~100. I really didn’t want 7 die much less 100, so I reached out for advice. In the meantime, I went to play with the blocks as best I could.

For the first round of the second quilt design I chose the smaller grid and chose blocks I liked. 

Then I expanded the design as Libs instructed in the class.

I don’t think this design is as successful even if I change the colors to the pink, black, white and grey I used in the first design. It is possible that if I fiddled around the second design some more that it would be improved. 

I think the random aspect really adds to the interest of the design process.

I also think the larger grid is more appealing.

I made a larger version of this design, which meant adding blocks and I had some problems. First, I didn’t like randomly adding blocks just to fill in a space. The decision felt like too much pressure. I know that sounds dumb, but there we are. Also, my mind has a certain aesthetic it likes. Without the randomness factor, I lean into that aesthetic. I think the larger version is more interesting, but not as interesting as the first design.

SueG had good results in a class she took with Libs Elliott. Remember I took a class from her at QuiltCon? While I wasn’t excited about the class, I did think she was a good teacher.

Now I am taking her Chaos with a Twist class, which is a Zoom class, so I can do it from the comfort of my workroom. This class has about 4 sessions and after the first (non-intro) session, I am in love. This process creates super modern, super creative quilts out of basic blocks.  It truly exemplifies why I love blocks. You have to take the class to get all the details. After going through Libs’ process I came up with the following design:

We started out on paper cutting and pasting and drawing with pencil and the quilt above is what I came up with after putting the basic blocks into EQ8. 

I moved blocks around and recolored some and came up with two versions of basically the same quilt top:

I like the circles on the edges better than the chevrons (above photo). Having them in black looks a bit like a black hole, so I tried some aqua. EQ8 didn’t really have the turquoise I wanted, but you get the idea.

I was annoyed at some of the students who were afraid of various parts of the process, but everyone has to go through their own process, right?

I want to start cutting fabric now and there are two more classes before we get to that point! I might just go for it and see what happens. None of these blocks are difficult to piece.