Currently working on another colossal scale quilt (~8.5 x 24 feet), working title Dreamer.  I’ve had the idea for some time.  I made a sketch while vacationing on San Juan Island in Washington state in early November 2016.

I started mostly with fabric from my existing collection, as well as several pieces given to me by felllow quilter, Dawn Eckrich, of Iowa City, Iowa.

This square was left over from Swim (2013).  The center piece (1×1″) was not the right size for that piece. This orphaned square continued to inspire my fascination with concentric square work.

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Summer 2017

Dreamer, 99″ (height) x 264″ (width)

As of early summer 2017, this is where I’ve landed with Dreamer.  When I arranged the squares according to the original sketch, I soon realized, albeit somewhat crestfallen, that at this scale, the piece needed more structure.  Just shy of despair, I decided to start from a classic ROYGBIV (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet) approach and see what happened.  There it was!  After months and months of labor to complete each individual tone-on-tone square, I was finally excited about the combined total.  It meant culling out three of the finished 33″ squares…but at this scale, there’s cast off just like in a smaller project where it happens less notably.  The missing square in the photo shows the floor at my office where I took the photo.  The reflection gave me insight that the piece needs a chromatic foil – white – a place for the eye to rest awhile and something to set off the color intensity. So the final square will be a white-on-(off)white combination.  I hope to have this piece sent to the hand quilter no later than January 2018, and hopefully ready for exhibit by late spring/early summer 2018.

Here is the final version of the quilt, sent to the hand quilter early November 2017.
Dreamer was finished being hand-quilted by late June 2018.
I drove to Shipshewana, Indiana to pick it up from my hand-quilting broker.

After hand-sewing 726 inches of binding on Dreamer, 

I had exactly this much thread left.  

I consider this a friendly nod from my muses living in this world and beyond.

Next stop: Le Carrefour Européen du Patchwork, France, September 2018.

Rainbow Power, Timmy Thomas – pretty much sums up what this quilt means to me.