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PAM ROCCO'S 25 TIPS FOR WORKING WITH LINEN
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The Lure of Linen
The quilt design for Pam Rocco’s Escher’s Stairs is
original. The traditional block she used as a starting
point was London Stairs, which is a Nine Patch.
Each block has nine units, and each is made up of
2 rectangular patches.
Pam wanted a slightly wonky look to her quilt so
she stacked two fabrics on top of each other, and
as she cut the patches, she cut them somewhat offgrain
and made a slightly angled cut across the
middle of the unit rather than cutting a perfect
rectangle (Fig. 1). Then, she simply switched the top
and bottom fabrics on one side of the stack (Fig. 2)
before sewing the patches together.
The London Stairs block (Fig. 3), when put
together, forms stairs moving in one direction. “I
knew that if I fiddled around enough, I could find
a way to make the stairs go in all four directions,
either branching out from the center like an X or
enclosing the center like an O with a series of
concentric zigzag rings, which is what I chose for
Escher’s Stairs,” says Pam. “It turned out that all I
needed to do was create three new variations of
London Stairs to use with the original block, and
the stairs would go any way I wanted,” explains
Pam. The first variation was a mirror image of the
original block (Fig. 4). For the other two variations,
Pam used a few blank, unpieced squares in the
Nine Patches and rearranged the pieced patches
(Figs. 5 and 6).
Deliberate color placement adds more interest to
this quilt and draws attention to the strong geometric
design of the concentric zigzag rings. Pam divided
the quilt down the middle and placed the orange
fabrics on the left and the yellow-green ones on the
right. To achieve maximum contrast, she arranged
the values from light to dark on the left and dark
to light on the right.
Play with the basic block and Pam’s variations–
or create variations of your own–to see how many
different quilts you can design from London Stairs.
Then pick your favorite and follow Pam’s 25 tips for
working with linen to make a luxurious linen quilt.
We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. |
