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I love fabric, texture and sewing. I am always looking to learn new techniques so I recently signed up to take a class from Joe Cunningham sponsored by my local guild the Tri Cities Quilt Guild. You can check out “Joe the Quilter” here. Joe is a great teacher. He’s calm, witty and plays his guitar for the class! We worked on his “Rock the Block, Block Style” technique. Joe’s technique creates an exciting art quilt.
I don’t know about you, but when I take classes I get all stressed out about what fabrics to take! Joe suggested four colors, pink, blue, green and brown. I couldn’t get out of my head enough to pick out patterned fabric, so I picked several variations of each color in solids. And it was a good thing I brought extra as I ran out of the original blue and yellow.
We started cutting squares, and slicing and sewing them back together as Joe instructed. Once we got going, it was lots of fun! I stopped stressing over each little seam and had a blast! In a few hours, I had twenty-five 6 ½” blocks made. We then laid the blocks on the table to try to put them in some sort of pleasing design. Unfortunately for me, I had reached my limit of being able to design anything! I pinned the squares together just in time to pack up. It was a fun day with lots of laughter with my friends and Joe.
A few days later I pinned the blocks up on my design wall. There was quite a bit of chaos going on!
So, I moved them around.
Again…
Are you dizzy yet? And I didn’t even take pictures of every evolution. Slowly but surely the piece was coming together into something pleasant to look at. When I started I didn’t think I would ever like this quilt. But finally, I got to this point and thought “I’m done. This looks good.” During all these reiterations, I recruited my husband to give me his opinions. Half way through the process, he said “This looks like a broken sauce.” (He does the cooking in our home!) Evidently a broken sauce is when you are making say, a Hollandaise sauce and it separates during cooking. In any case, I thought it was a perfect name for this quilt! “Broken Sauce” was born!
I sewed the squares together. Now it needed borders. I felt that the majority of the borders should be blue, but the small orange and yellow section on the top and side needed to be acknowledged. I had just enough orange to cut a small angled border and add it to a yellow angled border. I neglected to take a picture of the top with the borders. Sorry!
Well, we all know that comes next. Quilting! What type of design did I want to quilt on this broken sauce? Then a picture I had sitting on my cutting table caught my eye. My friends at Kneadle had allowed me to cut this picture of a man hole cover out of a display they had last July at the Fullerton Art Walk. I liked the roundness of the wedges and thought this quilt needed some organization like this man hole cover.
I set to drafting the circle and wedges. I got out my highly specialized tools of the trade to find the perfect circle size.
My husband makes me the perfect lemon drop in this glass!
I traced around the glass and had to figure out the starting points for the wedges on the circle. Did I mention that I never took geometry in high school? Back in the day you could graduate with ninth grade algebra. Wish I taken geometry instead of algebra! But this lack of knowledge won’t stop me! Once again, I got out my highly specialized tools of the trade.
I folded the half circle into wedges and then used the paper template to lightly mark the wedge marks on the circle. Using my long ruler, I connected the dots and marked the long lines out to the edge of the quilt. Sounds easy, huh? Not so much until I started connecting the correct dots to each other!
I decided to quilt with various color threads, echoing the wedge shape. I would mark two inches below the last wedge to start the neighboring wedge. It’s just something I made up and I think it turned out nice. Here’s a close up of the quilting.
After blocking the quilt and washing the quilting marks out, I bound the quilt using the hot pink “sticks” fabric.
And you know what? I actually like this “Broken Sauce”! This was a fun learning experience. I will use this technique again and add my own special ideas. I like classes that teach you something that you can build on. Thank you, Joe Cunningham!
“Broken Sauce” will go up for sale in my Shop. Check it out…
