Making The Lollypop Tree

First off, forgive my photos. They're taken with my phone for the sake of convenience, but one day I'll get my life right and take pretty ones with the fancy cam!

Anyhoo, I'm seven blocks into my 9-block version of Kim McLean's Lollypop Tree quilt. Most people do this quilt with Kaffe Fassett fabrics (as shown in the photo in the link above), which give the quilt an almost shimmery look with lots of movement and interest. Using Kaffe for a Kim McLean will always go right. So, because I'm dumb, I wanted to try it with 90% solids. I like to start all my quilts from a place of paralyzing uncertainty and abject fear, and this quilt was no exception.

Because most of quilty friends are in the modern quilting community, I thought I'd share what I'm going to call my "translation process" for the Lollypop Tree. That is, how I'm trying to negotiate making an interesting quilt of mostly solids and of approximately one billion appliqué pieces, a quilt that wasn't really meant for solids.

So here are the things I've done to help make my fabric choices:

1) When in doubt, I consult Pinterest and Google for images of nature. The fun of using Kaffe in a Kim McLean quilt is that it results in this super-fun Willy-Wonka-style carnival of color. Stems don't have to stem-colored, leaves can be made from floral fabrics, and it works. 

But I wanted my quilt to be rooted (no pun) more closely to nature: I wanted the stems and the leaves to seem more like what you'd find in the woods or in a garden, and I wanted the variation in color to seem, in a way, expected because of the expectations Nature has set up for us. 

So, if I wanted a block to be inspired by a lotus blossom, I looked at lots of photos to see color ranges for the blossoms, and also for the green that should surround them. If lotus blossoms were a bit yellow in the middle, I made sure to use yellow somewhere in that block.

2) I embrace using eight (or ten, or seventeen) versions of one color. One of the challenges with solids (and with so, so many pieces of appliqué) is that if I used the same color in more than, say, two places, it visually flattened the block pretty quickly. Again, when I went back to nature photos, I realized that leaves weren't always the same color, even if they shot out from a stem in pairs, so I started making the top leaves a different shade than the bottom leaves, so that the blocks didn't flatten too much. 

3) Pruning is okay. I wanted more negative space in my version of the quilt, so I often left off buds and leaves to make some room in each block. Where and when I decided to do that usually had to do with what was going on color-wise in that area. If I wanted more white background, and if I didn't know what color I'd make that part anyway if I kept it, it usually just went away! Doing this doesn't leave huge expanses of negative space, but it does give the eye a place to rest here and there.

4) I pretend all those border pieces don't exist. The border for the Lollypop Tree is what I call "the nursery": a collection of cute mini-plants to surround the "matured" blocks in the center grid of the quilt.  I'm going to have a border, but it will be white like the background of the blocks I've done and will be quilted in an interesting way. After looking at some vintage appliqué quilts in Robert Shaw's American Quilts: The Democratic Art, I've decided that even my binding and sashing will be white, in a deep bow to the centuries-old quilts that made me love quilts. So the only color on the quilt will be in the nine lollypop trees. I hope it ends up striking and not boring!

So those are the thoughts I keep coming back to in this (long) process. It goes to the longarmer October 1st, so I've got some serious work to do!