Anna Grossnickle Hines                                                                                    Home    Guide
Creating the
Protest Quilt
and the Moon Quilt

My first thoughts for the book were to have the quilts "bleed" off the edges of the page, in other words, no borders. Some of the quilts, like this one, I envisioned on one page, with the poem on the other, perhaps with a fabric background.

The first round of comments from my editors changed that idea. They felt strongly that the quilts should have borders, like the quilts in PIECES, particularly since this was to be a companion book. They were absolutely right, even if Winter Lights weren't a companion book borders do a lot to set the quilts off.


All images and text © Anna Grossnickle Hines 2005


In this sketch and the one above the only real fabric is the sky and the one orange hill. The other textures are created in Photoshop. The fabric is a piece of Mickey Lawler's Skydyes™ that I had leftover from WHISTLING. I had to stretch it out in PhotShop to make it fit a double page design.

Here I've drawn my lines in a top layer and between that and the design above I've added a scan of the real fabric. I didn't have a piece left that would work, so I contacted Mickey and met her while she was doing a retreat not too far from me in California. I showed her my sketches for this quilt and the moon quilt below. She painted the fabrics for my skies and sent them to me.

I scanned a number of other fabrics that I thought would work for this quilt, and tried them in various spaces. I had everything I needed in my stash except the snow in the foreground. It had to have the tinge of the sunset, be very light, but not too light, and have a little variation in it, but not a distinct pattern. I bought several pieces before I found one I liked.

I printed the lines of my pattern full size, using 3 pieces of 11 by 17 inch paper. I traced the lines onto the back side of a piece of muslin to use as the foundation of the quilt as I had done in WHISTLING.

I also traced patterns for each piece onto freezer paper.

Then I cut out the sky area so I could lay my pattern on the wonderful Skydyesfabric and choose just the right part.

I have also laid out my other fabrics. I was doing this as I was scanning fabrics to try work into the design, working back and forth, until I was happy with the results. I then cut out the pieces and assembled the quilt using lines of basting stitches to guide me placing the pieces, again, the technique I had developed for WHISTLING.

I added the border and hand-quilted to complete the piece.

The moon quilt was done in much the same way. This sketch was made in PhotoShop. It looked very flat until I added the white line of moonlight around the standing figures.

I added the border, trees and stars and have toned the shadows down a bit. I saved only a few of the many variations of things I tried as I designed my quilts.

Now I've darkened the trees and added a little snow on the branches. Since there were relatively few fabrics in this one, I didn't scan and try them as did for the Protest quilt. I could see well enough how they would look just by placing them in layers in the proportions they would be in the quilt.

Again, I've printed my pattern lines full size....

...and I've cut out the sky area to carefully choose which part of the SkyDyes™ I want to use. As in Protest that big snowy foreground area was the most difficult fabric to find.

I put this quilt together using the same appliqué techniques I used for the Protest quilt.

Six quilts finished now. I'm still working on Solstice bit by bit, but I start Lights Out.

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