Stripe Quilts Made Modern: 12 Bold & Beautiful Projects—Tips & Tricks for Working with Striped Fabrics

By Lauren S. Palmer

Learning useful techniques to create one of 12 stunning, strip quilts in this collection.

Get the look of complex piecing with a savvy shortcut—striped fabric! Blogger and modern quilter Lauren Palmer of Olive Tree Textiles shares 12 versatile quilt patterns using solid stripes, multicolored stripes, and even chevrons. Slice apart striped fabric and rearrange it into modern blocks to create illusions of movement, depth, and texture. Pick up useful techniques, like cutting on the bias and arranging blocks in alternate grids. Patterns range from beginner to more advanced and each quilt is shown in two colorways—it’s easy to use any striped fabric from your stash!

• Save time piecing! 12 bold projects using striped fabric as an essential design element

• Stripes aren’t just for bindings—cut fabric on the bias, work in a grid, and use chevrons in new ways

• Get inspired with two color options and three sizes for each project

Praise for Stripe Quilts Made Modern

“If you always thought of stripes only of bindings, think again! The 12 projects in this book (each in three sizes) will open your mind to new opportunities and the creative use of all kinds of stripes?from bold symmetrical repeats to fun chevrons.” —American Quilt Retailer

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781617452604

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Stripes Are Everywhere

Striped fabrics are a staple in the modern textile industry. One of the oldest patterns seen throughout history, the stripe is also one of the most resilient designs of all time. Stripes are everywhere—on clothing, furniture, art, and architecture—and of course, in many designer fabric collections available today.

A stripe is defined simply as a line that contrasts in color or value from an adjacent surface. When contrasting lines are stacked in parallel and printed on cotton fabric, quilters are presented with a premade sheet of perfectly linear material, ready for us to slice apart and rearrange into something new. Striped fabrics can be amazingly versatile, and they come in all shapes and sizes, each with its own set of visual qualities that we can use to create illusions of complexity, movement, depth, and texture.

The quilts in this book feature stripes as an essential design element, transforming this simple pattern into a useful tool for modern quilters.

What Makes a Quilt Modern?

The quilting community has tried to define what exactly makes a quilt modern, with no universally accepted answer to date. We can all agree that modern quilts are different, breaking the rules and pushing the boundaries set by traditionalists. Quilt tops are now thought of like an artist’s canvas, no longer confined to the strict definition of pieced quilt blocks arranged in a grid. Borders are no longer necessary, and are often left off in favor of a continuous design that extends to the edges of a quilt. Solids are used more often than prints, and straight-line quilting is favored for its cleanliness and order.

Modern? Minimal? What’s the Difference?

For me, the definition of modern directly relates back to the modern art movement, beginning in the mid-1860s and lasting up through the 1970s. Picasso, Kandinsky, Matisse, and van Gogh were all modernists and were all known for rejecting the old rules in favor of freedom and experimentation.

A number of new artistic movements sprang from modernism, one of which was minimalism, beginning in the 1950s. Minimalism was about extreme simplicity, emphasizing and celebrating the stripped-down, essential elements of a given medium. Any unnecessary decoration was left off to set the focus on perfect craftsmanship and pure geometric forms.

The term modern is applied to quilting in the same all-encompassing way as it is to art, inclusive of any quilt that breaks the traditional rules to emphasize freedom and expression.

Minimalism is a substyle of the modern quilting movement, using the same extreme simplicity seen in minimalist art. Quilting and minimalism mesh so well because of the strong emphasis on craftsmanship and the use of perfect geometry. Many of the quilts in this book are minimalist, particularly the ones with even-width stripes, made from simple elements to create dynamic effects.

Invite the Stripes Inside

Stripes became an important tool for me when I began to treat them as a design element in my quilts. A stripe is simply a line—the most basic component of the visual world.

For many years, I’d slotted all striped fabrics into the same category: For Binding Only. I realized that in my many years as a quilter, I almost never used stripes in the quilt designs themselves.

If you, too, just had a light-bulb moment and realized that you tend to use stripes for bindings and not much else, you aren’t alone. Quilters tend to avoid stripes because they can be risky and overpowering. The designs in this book show that stripes can be used to create eye-pleasing modern quilts, without any of the dizzying, eye-crossing illusions that can be hard to look at.

This book will help you let go of your old ideas about what stripes should be. These projects and techniques will help you invite the world of striped fabrics to the inside of your quilt compositions, instead of banishing them to a lonely existence along the perimeter.

Modern Stripes

I like using stripes for a very practical reason: A cut piece of striped fabric resembles a pieced block that would have taken much more time to construct than simply cutting a square of fabric. This idea challenges the traditional rule that a quilt block has to be assembled from different pieces of fabric—but I’ve never been much for playing by the rules, anyway. I like to think of stripes as a valuable tool rather than a shortcut, a word that may have a negative connotation to some quilters.

Thinking of striped squares as quilt blocks can be a huge advantage in the world of modern quilting, not just as a time saver but also as a valuable design tool. Complex geometric designs can arise with very simple piecing, giving beginners the ability to create an intricate-looking quilt, and allowing experienced quilters to save time piecing and spend more time quilting.

Stripes give us the additional advantage of reducing bulk, helping us keep quilt tops nice and flat without having to deal with a mountain of seams.

In the spirit of modernism and breaking the rules, let’s try using stripes in a whole new way.

Design Fundamentals and Quilting

In the first chapter, Stripe Theory, I explain some essential design concepts related to stripes, using quilt blocks as examples. I’ll show you some techniques to create different visual effects based on these fundamentals, and how to apply your new design knowledge to quilting.

In the next chapter, Working with Stripes, detailed photographs demonstrate specific instructions for striped fabrics: cutting, piecing, and adding accents to backing