TGIFF! - Turning Back the Clockwork Orange

Snowstorm today so 

Clockwork Orange

posed for pictures 

in the basement

Welcome to TGIFF! Today, I'm turning back the clock to 1999, when Santana's "Smooth" was topping the charts, when Jean Chrétien was Prime Minister of Canada and Bill Clinton was President of the United Stated, when companies were preparing for the Y2K Bug, when people were stocking their cupboards and filling their bathtubs just in case the world felt apart at the seams when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1999. That is when I started today's finish.

I shared this poor quilt's story back in November when I pulled it out of the On Hold pile and finished the top.

Here's the finished Clockwork Orange!

Beige and black rail fence panel offset
in a black background with
orange striped accents. 

From Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr's book, Quilts Made Modern, I learned that the technical problem with my rail fence fabrics are their figure/ground relationship. On fabric, the figure is the illustration and the ground is the background. Because my fabrics all have similar figure and ground colours, they read as one when pieced together even though they have different scales. I needed more contrast or different colours between them for the rail fence to work properly. Good to know!

The back made of leftover fabrics.

The back is pieced using the remaining blocks and fabrics from the rail fence. Love the back! I was thrilled to use up all the Millennium text fabric and glad that there was a bit of the clock fabric left over for other projects.

Detail of the free motion
quilting of the full cog.

For the quilting, I used straight line quilting in black and orange thread for some of the border, some free motion 'hardwood floor' quilting in the rail fence area, and some free motion overlapping 'cogs' on the black around the rail fence area. I did a few full cogs and quilted some details inside them. Very happy with the cogs and straight line quilting (done with my walking foot), less so with the hardwood floor area (it's hard to do free motion straight-line quilting over so many seams!).

It's the first time I tried bamboo batting and it's also the first time I washed a quilt before taking pictures. I don't know if there was something in the laundry or if it was just the batting, but there was some serious lint/bearding issues when this came out of the dryer!

Quiltography: "Clockwork Orange," by Michèle-Renée Charbonneau, Ottawa, 67" by 88", 2011.

While it's not my favourite quilt, I am doing the happy dance with how it finished and I'm very glad it is off the WIP list!

Finishing Clockwork Orange is also what I pledged to finish this week for Amy's One Week One Thing Challenge.

Your turn, party people!

Clockwork Orange - A Finished Top

Remember this Millennium Rail Fence that I wrote about last week? I started with this, smacked it on my design wall and started playing with the suggestions from the wonderful folks who gave me their feedback last week. Thanks again for sharing your ideas with me! I love how people come up with really different ideas. It's fun to see all the different directions a quilt can go it -- and they can all work beautifully.

First, I tried some red on the border and as some applique. Nope, nothing I had worked well. Then I tried purple - nope. Needed something warmer. Pulled out the five orange fabrics that I have in my stash and auditioned them. Bingo! A dark red-orange seemed to work best -- it added some colour, but didn't clash.

Detail photo of Clockwork Orange

One suggestion was to just sandwich it, quilt and bind it. That was so tempting! Before going that route though, I thought I'd see if I could do something to visually tame the pattern craziness so I played around with some solid black. I'd had the idea of offsetting the rail fence in black so I tried that. Up on the design wall with the orange accent, I was liking it. A lot.

Detail photo of Clockwork Orange

But there was too much black. So I added an orange cross. That did it for me. With the orange cross and the black border, it will be a twin-sized quilt.

I don't find it a pretty quilt, but I love it anyways. Perhaps I love it because of just how disappointed I was with it originally. Or maybe I'm just in the honeymoon stage and in a year, I will say, "what was I thinking?!" Time will tell.

As I was pressing the orange stripe in the cross, I thought of the perfect name. Let's face it, Millennium Rail Fence had to go. A) Millennium was so last, well, millennium (sorry, just couldn't resist), and B) it was not a successful rail fence so I'd rather not emphasize what's not working. Clocks + orange = Clockwork Orange. Yay! So here is my Clockwork Orange finished top. Woo hoo! One WIP saved.

Clockwork Orange Top