Quilt-Colored Pencils

Last year my quilt guild ran a Candy Exchange.  A piece of "candy" was a 6" square of fabric. The fabric was to be a 100% cotton (not a batik) in a print that would read like a solid.  Each month was assigned a different color.  Each month we would trade our "candies" with the other member who were participating.  Example: January was Blue and we had 18 participants, so I sent out 18 blue 6" square and I received 18 different blue squares.

At the end of the year I had quite the rainbow.

For our guild show this year I wanted to make a quilt using a variety of my squares.



Looking online I was inspired by many wonderful quilts with crayon or pencil themes.  However, none of them were just what I wanted.  What I really wanted was for my pencils to look like they were in the middle of being played with. I liked the idea that they looked scattered around as if in use by a child.  Colored Pencils is the result of my playing around with all my "candies". Forming the colored fabrics into an active looking pencil quilt. The width of my pencils was determined by the 6" "candy" squares.  If you look close at the quilting at  the end of each  pencil the quilting has the pencil writing what color it is.


Colored Pencils is 61' X 75" .  Quilted in a meandering design with details, done on my domestic sewing machine.  The backing is a cotton.  I love the backing fabric, all the colors are wonderful and it fits the theme.  However, because it is so colorful if the quilt is hanging with the light behind it those colors do shadow a bit on the white areas. Lesson learned, be very careful with your backing when dealing with a light colored front.