167. Briar Rosary

 

The story of this quilt began back in 2013 when Amy Smart from Diary of a Quilter invited me to design a block for a series she was running called the Virtual Quilting Bee.

There were 16 designers and we each had to come up with a block, and then make it in both solids and prints.

The block I designed is called Chiral Music (named by our son, Aaron), a rather quirky name. I had texted him a picture of the block and said I felt it needed a better name than "In and Out" or "Hello-Goodbye," and he immediately texted back "chiral." I wondered if he had meant "choral" because I had never heard of the term "chiral." He said that chiral refers to a molecule that appears to be a mirror image but actually is not exactly superimposable (he knows a lot of scientific information). I liked the name a lot, and added "music" as kind of a play on words since I had originally thought he meant "choral."

I really liked the block. It is basically just a 9-patch, with a frame, and finishes at 8"x8". I had a fat quarter stack of Heather Ross's line, Briar Rose, so I made another Chiral Music block.

Then I decided to play around with it, basically turning the four sets of half-square triangles in a different direction, and came up with this block.

 At about the same time, I had a stack of Cherrywood hand-dyed fabrics in beautiful blues and greens. I made a quilt to submit to Modern Patchwork for possible publication and it looked like this. I really liked the graphic element of the chain seeming to connect the blocks together, and named it Chain Link.

After all these years, I have finally completed the version done with the Briar Rose fabrics. I thought of beads on a string, and named it Briar Rosary.

The one Chiral Music block was added to the back.

I love the way the quilt turned out, and it was beautifully quilted by Darby.

Name:  Briar Rosary
Quilt Size: 40" x 40"
Block Size: 8" x 8"
Designed and Made by: Cindy Wiens
Quilted by: Darby Myers