First things first! Random Number Generator says that the winner of the organic bundle from Fabricworm is #125, Scody! Congrats!!
Thank you for all your comments and welcome to my new readers. With 613 comments, I couldn't respond to all of them but I did read and appreciate each one.
And BTW, If you have emailed me in the past few days, because I have each comment emailed to me, your email was probably temporarily lost in the shuffle. Give me today to weed through the giveaway comments and find your email and I will respond!
Now on to my musings... ;)
I woke up the other night wondering {with a hint of worry} if all the good quilts have already been made. I know; waking up thinking about quilting is definitely strange.
What got me going on this was getting EQ7. As I was scrolling through the block library, I saw block after block that could easily be a modern and original design but turned out to be an old traditional block.
In the grand scheme of things I haven't been quilting that long but I guess I've been quilting long enough to see some of the trends come and go... and observe some others come from the past and into the present.
What used to be wonky has, in many ways, come back around to straight or even curvy.
Stippling has become "easy" and intricate patterns or straight lines have become more popular.
image from Charleston Museum What used to be an old, traditional block has morphed and become all the rage with a different name... and I really like the new version!
image credit Gee's Bend has become improv.
Amish style quilts are now quilts made from Kona solids.
And maybe the funniest to me, what used to be a zig-zag quilt is now a chevron quilt.
What's old is new again.
With my mind often spinning with designs, I'm starting to realize that there are only so many shapes which is pretty much what quilting is. Shapes & colors. So are there only a finite number of designs before we just start repeating the same ones with different twists?
Perhaps I'm over-thinking this and maybe this is nothing new to those who have been quilting longer than I have. But it does make me wonder about and smile at the whole modern vs. traditional discussion of last year because we seem to have come full circle in many ways. And personally, I like it!
What originally made me fall in love with quilting was combining modern fabrics with traditional blocks... it's such a pleasant balance of design. So I'm happy to see such beautiful patterns like Swoon that strike that balance perfectly.
But that takes me back to the beginning of my post... what if all the good quilts have already been made?? And by made, I guess I mean designed. And because I love the design process just as much as the quilting process, I can't help but stop and think about it. Anyone who designs much of anything wants to be original and creative.
But when it wakes me up at night, that might be considered a problem. So I found it interesting to read that historically, spring was when quilters used to hang their quilts to air out and that was the time where other quilters gathered new inspiration. These days all we have to do is go online or even on an iPhone and the amount of inspiration out there can be overwhelming. Maybe they were on to something in unveiling new designs less often.
I certainly don't want to go back to seeing everyone's quilts once each spring but maybe I'm at the point right now where I need to stop thinking about it, stop obsessing over every piece of inspiration I see out there, and just make some quilts that I love.
Have you ever gotten to this over saturated point before? I wonder what would happen to our quilting trends if we took in less and made more...