Light in the Crook of Shadows

Fall’s come to the bedroom.

I like to change up the quilt at the bottom of my bed every once in a while away from the standard blue one-patch that usually resides there.  And the fall colors really create a different mood in the room.

I began this quilt in a class about plaids, taught at Road to California by Roberta Horton.  One thing she said always stuck with me, and that was not too worry too much if the grain line was perfectly straight.  Part of that is because you could lose your mind trying to get it perfect on these ikat and plaid fabrics.  But, she said, slightly off-grain plaids give an energy to the quilt, and so to worry over them also deprives you of some motion within the design.

I chose a simple block design of a smaller square bordered by two triangles, all sewn to a larger triangle.  You can do a lot of things with this block.

I had fun adding that orange checkerboard as an inner border.

Here’s the crazy-pieced back.

And the labels.  The title and blurb come from my love of two words at the time: crook, meaning in the corner of something, like a “crooked elbow,” and illume, a variant of illuminate.  Click to enlarge if you want to see someone get carried away with fancy words, although I still like the title of the quilt very much.  I’d just change up a few things in that description tag. At that time I was in the final years of my undergraduate degree in Creative Writing, and was awash in fancy words — not only my own, but those of my classmates and visiting writers and seminars and all the books I was reading.  But I’ve decided that our quilts are as much a creation for all times as they are a record of who we were when we made them. Fancy-schmancy words and all.