When we first received the prompt Anatomy, I immediately thought of the 1959 Otto Preminger film Anatomy of a Murder. I streamed it and made a list of all the things in the movie that would lend themselves to being created in cloth in my symbographic style. Bookshelves, cars, and Lee Remick’s sunglasses were but a few. But I just couldn’t get Saul Bass’ iconic movie titles out of my head. So what if I just went with the human form? I intentionally did not want to create human forms in any of my other quilts, so why was it with this prompt that I felt drawn to make anatomical shapes?

I quickly realized that it had been too many years since my figure drawing classes. Because I couldn’t remember the canon for human proportions, I turned to my friend Google for some tips. (Side note: I bookmarked the one I liked best, and In the intervening months, the site changed to something completely unrelated. Note to self: take a screenshot of important things along with bookmarking the page) I cut some rectangles in the appropriate proportions and started playing with poses.

Yes, I thought, this could work. Then I moved to the computer and played with colors. Saul Bass used a lot of black, yellow and red. So if used those colors, I could make the anatomy quilt be a tribute to Saul, albeit not in a minimalist way. (Another side note: Many movie poster designers copied Saul’s (yes, we’re now on a first name basis) style. Contrary to popular belief, Saul did not create the poster for West Side Story. Here’s a visual list of all his movie posters.)

I thought about the shapes, especially the negative space around the bodies, and realized it would be easier to create pattern pieces for the figures. If I used Adobe Illustrator, I could create the shapes and with the push of a button even the add 1/4” seam allowances. Here are some of the files I created to make the pattern pieces.

I was adding frames around the pieces and thought it would be cool to have some of them look like film strips. Despite what you may think, making wonky shaped “holes” is much more work than making them uniform. What was I thinking?

Then I remembered some of Saul’s other movie posters, like Vertigo, and decided to make a spiral-ish sort of design for the background. My computer layout looked great, but how was I ever going to piece it together? This is when I seriously thought about doing raw edge applique—but I didn’t want to change techniques in the middle of the Cloth in Common round. My goal this time was to piece all the quilts. So with a combination of piecing and turned edge appliqueing, I got all the parts to fit.

As for the quilting, I knew that I wanted parts to be quilted in a wonky, sharp cornered meander, but other parts were just calling out to be stitched along the edges.  So I put on my “accuracy matters” hat and started outlining the bodies and frames. Boy was I happy to get to the wonky quilting. It progresses so much faster!

Lots of dense quilting shrinks the size of the quilt, and this one shrunk more than most.  My last dilemma was to decide if I would add a binding to meet the 40” length requirement or forget the requirement and put a facing on the quilt.  A border around the edge, while it would have still looked like a movie poster, was just not the look I wanted.  So I present to you Tribute to Saul, a 39” long quilt.

Tribute to Saul
Deb Cashatt
Dimensions: 39″ h x 24.25″ w
Material: Commercial cotton, cotton batting.
Technique: Machine pieced and hand appliqued. Machine quilted.