My LQS (local quilt shop) – Mill House Quilts has a free quilt club program it runs throughout the months.  I’m actually participating in THREE this year and they’ve been so wonderful!  One of those clubs is …

Modern Quilting Club

3rd Thursday of each month | 9:30 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.
Modern quilt club explores the ever expanding world of modern quilts. Bring any modern quilts, or ideas you have and join the fun. Our resource book for 2015 is Lucky Spool’s Essential Guide to Modern Quilt Making: From Color to Quilting: 10 Design Workshops by Your Favorite Teachers. You may make any size project you wish. Book required. Hosted by Audrey Manning. FREE! I actually already owned Lucky Spool’s Essential Guide to Modern Quilt Making: From Color to Quilting: 10 Design Workshops by Your Favorite Teachers before the club started and it really is a great book full of some wonderful resources!  Each month someone from the club takes a chapter and does a little demonstration/talk about what they learned from the chapter and they give us an assignment for the next month. After class, Audrey and I were chatting and we started to debate if certain fabrics could be used to make a modern quilt or if only ‘modern’ fabrics could be used.  We decided a personal challenge was in order and you all know how much I love a challenge!  We felt that homespuns were one of the most ‘non-modern’ genre’s of fabric we could get our hands on so the challenge was set – Can Homespun be Modern? So … I purchased a bundle of homespun fabrics from Mill House Quilts to use for my quilt (can you believe I don’t have them in my current stash!?) My plan was to make the quit “Color Play” by Kari Vojtechovsky from the Spool book.  Kari’s quilt also took second place at QuiltCon 2015 in the ‘Negative Space’ category!  I literally had just started working on mine when Kari’s quilt was popping up everywhere!  It’s gorgeous! My crosses were going to be made of the homespun with solids as the rest of my fabrics.  Well – it turns out the bundle I purchased was of 5” x 10” pieces.  This wasn’t going to cut it for this pattern!  It’s a classic “make it work” moment so I decided to shadow the homespun fabrics with solids and just create another design element from it.  It worked great! I’m using a fun muslin in purple that doesn’t look like it’s been pressed for my ‘neutral’ of the quilt.  I’m also going to pull in some deconstruction of the block for this quilt as I continue to work on it.  I’m not sure if I’ll actually reach the goal of modern … but only time will tell as this piece continues! Pip helping me photograph my quilt progress … channeling her inner ‘Tarmen’.  So what do you think the answer will be – Can Homespun be Modern?