04 Jun 3601 – 4200 Minutes

This post is the seventh in a series about my 2020 100 Day Project called 6000 Minutes.  In a nutshell, I am spending 60 minutes each Monday thru Friday for 100 Days working on projects and sharing the results.  You can read more about my thoughts and how I came up with this project on the original post here.  These blog posts are about the finished projects.  For the daily in-progress posts, see my feeds on Instagram or Facebook.

On Day 60, I started a mini-series using a “staple” shape.  The first version is called Spilling Staples and finishes at 20″ x 10″.  This shape is so much fun to work with!  The shapes for these three pieces were free cut with scissors.  For this piece, I placed them rather randomly and then quilted the whole thing with white thread very evenly spaced.  I often like the juxtaposition of even and uneven.

I’ve been thinking a lot about connectedness during this pandemic and the next piece, A Cohesion of Staples, reflects those thoughts.  Each shape is connected to at least one other shape either by touching or by black thread.  The Cohesion part of the title is about connectedness, of course, but I also thought of it as sort of like a flock of starlings – a gathering of staples is called a cohesion (I totally made that up, but I like it!).  It is 9″ x 12″.

The third and final piece in the mini series is A Stack of Staples (Days 64-65).  This shape is a natural one for stacking!  The more ordered composition led me to do unevenly spaced straight lines for the quilting.  This one is also 9″ x 12″.

These three pieces are available here, here, and here.

I have loved making so many small, improv, fusible appliqué pieces during my project this year, but coming up to Day 66, I was getting a yen to do something organic, a bit bigger, and with turned under edges.  I cut a background at 40″ wide by 30″ high and started playing.  It took three days (so about three hours) to finish the top.  I started quilting on Day 70.  While designing this piece I was again (still?) thinking about connectedness.  While I love the look of stark black lines against a white background, I wanted to the two to have more interaction this time.  I chose to use a heavier than usual thread to continue the black lines into the background.  Then I quilted it with my usual white thread.  This piece took eight days to complete, plus another two days for facing, taking me well into the next blog post.