The Quiet Quilt

The Quiet Quilt

I love a good snowfall.
I love how it blankets everything, quieting it down and smoothing it out.
It calms me.

This little stinker loves snow, too.

But for different reasons.

Rock on, Buzz!


As this snow fell last week, I looked out my window and said to myself, "I've got to finish the binding on the Quiet Quilt, it will look perfect if I photograph it out in this snow."
And so I did.


I present to you, the Quiet Quilt:


The design is mine.  The choice in fabrics was inspired by Malka Dubrawsky's "low volume" work (which I have mentioned before and you can read about here).

I paid a local long arm quilter to do the quilting for me.  Lovely work, no? 


So tell, me, what do you think of the lack of balance in this quilt?

"Balance" is one of the traditional quilting obsessions that I sometimes wonder about.  I mean, why does everything have to be balanced? 

I see people talking about balancing geometric patchwork with curvy quilting.

I see people struggling to balance the distribution of hue and saturation as they arrange fabrics within a block and blocks within a quilt top.

There is the continual reliance on symmetry, another type of balance.

When I was laying out the Quiet Quilt and I landed on this configuration, I could immediately see that it wasn't balanced.  But I really liked it.  So I made no attempt to balance it.  Not it terms of color distribution, not in terms of value, not even in terms of where a particular print popped up.  All of these elements are clumpily, lumpily, unevenly distributed.  And the design is not symmetrical.  So so wrong.  And yet, to me, right.
Is the drive for balance something modern quilters might be willing to question?  Next time you are playing around with a quilt, will you give some unbalanced arrangements a go?
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