Behind the Scenes: United "Concensus" for Project Quilting

Yes, I know that "consensus" is spelled with three esses, and not two cees.  But my quilt is named United "Concensus" for a particular reason, and I'll try to explain why.


The challenge for the most recent "Project Quilting" assignment was entitled "Stars Over America" and had very few restrictions.  If you used red, white, and blue, you had to use at least one other color, but you weren't required to use those three colors.  That's it.


I actually refused to look at the challenge for a couple of days, because I had so many things on my plate last week that I was worried that looking at it would stress me out and I wouldn't get to the things in front of it on my list.  So it wasn't until Tuesday that I actually looked at it, and really late that night when I came up with my concept & knew what I was going to do.


When I read the theme, I knew I wanted to make stars, and the first technique that came to mind was Gwen Marston's "liberated" star block.  This is actually an AWESOME block to make when you're in a hurry, because your points don't have to match, and in actuality, the more wonky they are, the better they look.


I also knew that I wanted to have a star represent every state, like it does in our flag.  That meant piecing 50 blocks.  You might think that only someone insane would think to do something like that when they have to completely finish a quilt in 4 days, attend a wedding, and cut 100 pillowcase cuffs in that same timeframe too.  But you would have been wrong.  It's not the insane person who thinks to do something like that; the insanity is in COMMITTING to doing such a thing, and then actively making the attempt.


What made it worse is that I chose an accent color (yellow) for which I actually did not have a suitable fabric choice in my stash - which meant a trip to the fabric store.  But once I drew out the block, I knew only yellow would do.  Here's a pretty rough sketch:

In reality, the wonky blocks won't be nearly as uniform, but it does give an idea.  I first sketched this block plainly so I knew for sure that there would be 50 units (actually there are 60 because I thought I'd include the US territories too) before adding the star blocks.


The largest block is 12" finished; the smallest is 2" finished.  Yup... you read that right.  I designed a quilt that required pieced wonky star blocks (no paper was involved) that started with 1-1/8" squares.  Are you convinced yet that I am certifiable?


After I drew this, I thought that it would be cool to add information about each state, and actually write this in the blocks, so I went hunting for the day of statehood, the state capital, and population.  That's when it hit me:  this is 2010, and we just completed the census.  Wouldn't it be cool if each block were named based on the population size?  Therefore the largest block would be the state with the largest population, and vice versa.  Well, based on 2009 population statistics, the 12" block would be California - so I decided that I needed a focal point, which made me change the center block to blue.  I also changed the "extra" blocks from magenta to a mix of red & blue.

Now the second biggest state by population is Texas, and that block has a red center.  Now, from that, you might start to infer that there's some sort of political meaning behind all of this - red states, blue states, with red being dominant to show how right wing conservatism is sweeping through the nation, swallowing up the free-thinking, liberal tree-huggers, blah blah blah.  Well, don't get your undies in a bunch.  The color of each block was dictated purely by aesthetics and my willingness to make extra blocks when I decided that a particular section didn't have enough contrast.  The sketch is nice, but things are different when you have things on your design wall and they don't quite look right, and you have to do something else to fix it.


Although I've abandoned my idea of writing the state names & information directly on the blocks (I was too scared to either make a mistake or worried that I would HATE the way it looked & ruin the blocks permanently), I did decide to do two things.  One, I named the quilt, purposely spelling "consensus" incorrectly because I DO intend to tie it to the census.  Two, once the census numbers are released, I will print a large "legend" for the quilt to give the information I had originally planned to hand write.


Wait until you see how this turned out!

Happy quilting!