Isolation is our current prompt. I’m sure with the outbreak of Novel Coronavirus 2, isolation has been on many of your minds. Experiencing and thinking about it is one thing, but how was I going to express isolation in a quilt? First I googled the definition.

Grrr.  I just hate definitions that define a word using the word, don’t you?  So I looked up isolate. But that didn’t give me any ideas either.

I thought about what I had been doing these past 7 months.  Keeping to myself, sure. But what’s different about that? I’m an introvert, so being by myself is pretty normal—except when it comes to work.  I’m half of the Pixeladies. Kris Sazaki and I have a legal business partnership, and we collaborate on art, teaching, and writing.  Since we haven’t been meeting in person, I’ve had time to take on a couple of projects by myself.  I’ve created a couple of quilts, and I even joined the 7×7 challenge organized by Studio Art Quilt Associates.  The purpose of the 7×7 challenge is create something every day (7 days a week) for 7 weeks.  We have a Facebook page where we show off our creations to others who are participating in the challenge. I had bunch of blocks leftover from one of the quilts I had created earlier, so I thought I’d create some more and put them together into a quilt.  After day two, I started to create wonky Greek key blocks.  I liked making them so much I put the other blocks on the back burner and just kept on making keys. 

Soon thereafter the keys started morphing into other shapes, and one of the other members named them alien keys (Thank you, Tricia). 

I just loved that. So every so often I would throw in another alien key.  Then I started playing with these isolated blocks (You knew I would get to isolation eventually, didn’t you?) on my design wall.  The Greek keys and the alien keys worked very well together.  They stopped being isolated blocks; the lines and shapes joined together quite well.  I was having a great time creating new blocks and rearranging them.  Here’s one of the patterns.

Once I decided that the Greek and alien keys would become my isolation quilt, I realized I had a tiny problem. I thought I was being very clever by making the block for a 7×7 challenge seven inches by seven inches.  Do you know what 7 x 7 is?  It’s 49, and even subtracting for seam allowances the quilt would be over 40” high, the required size for our Cloth in Common quilts.  So, like I did with my quilt for the international prompt, I decided to photograph the real blocks and play with the image in Photoshop.  Below on the left are the blocks I created for the international prompt, and on the right is the completed quilt for Cloth in Common. If you want to read more about my process in creating the indigo quilt, check out this post. My process for creating the isolation quilt is very similar to the indigo quilt.

And that’s where I’m going to leave you.  The fabric from the digital design is being printed as we speak.  Come back at the end of November to see what the final quilt looks like.