Greenville Mini Quilt Challenge

Way back last year, I was invited to be part of a successful proposal for an exhibit at the Greenville Center for the Creative Arts, put together by the Modern Design Lab, a group of quilters out of Greenville, South Carolina. We are still hoping that this exhibition will be going forward as scheduled, and as part of the exhibition, we were all challenged to make mini quilts which will be exhibited as a group.

The challenge was to use this photo of one of the textile mills in Greenville as inspiration, as Greenville was an important center of cotton processing in the late 1800s. We were asked to use (green) Kona Grasshopper fabric plus any other white/gray/black fabrics of our choice.

I typically end up making challenge quilts when the challenge really speaks to me and I come up with an idea for it rapidly. This was not the case for this challenge—I at first had trouble finding something in the photo that really spoke to me, and since this quilt is to be exhibited as part of a group show, rather than experimenting with a new technique or style, I wanted to make sure that the finished mini actually represented my style as an artist. Plus, there is no green in this photo and that really threw me!

After a long time of staring at the image, I finally noticed the small section of greenish/grayish brick on the lefthand side of the photo.

This made me think of disintegration, and creating a disintegrating design inspired by bricks was finally the idea I’d been searching for!

Since the additional fabrics were all supposed to be white/gray/black, I dug through my stash for scraps of some of the black prints I’ve used for other projects. I thought incorporating some of my science-themed fabrics would be fun, since milling textiles, like most any manufacturing, involves science.

To enhance the design and help tie the disintegration into the quilting, I quilted a few black blocks in the green solid areas and a few green blocks in the black.

The finished mini was supposed to be 15″ x 15″. I often find that my quilting shrinks the size of the quilt, so I had hoped that making a 15½” x 15½” unfinished mini and quilting it densely would bring it down to just the right size, but it was still 15½” x 15½” after quilting, so rather than adding a pieced binding as I originally intended, I added a facing which brought the finished quilt down to the proper size. The back isn’t super beautiful—it looks like some bearding of the batting happened and there are a few spots of terrible tension, but it’s still fun to see the design on the black backing!

Even though I took a long time to find something about the photo that I found inspiring, now that the mini is done I’m really happy with it, and I feel like it will represent my style well in the show. I’m crossing my fingers that the show (currently scheduled for June 5 through July 29) will be able to go ahead, as it promises to be awesome!