2014's Hive 7 wins quilt show ribbons!

I wasn't able to post about this quilt on the Stash Bee blog last fall when I finished it, so I thought I’d do so now, because I wanted to let 2014’s Hive 7 know that YOU GUYS ARE WINNERS! I entered the finished quilt in my local guild’s show, held this past weekend, and it brought home both a first place ribbon in the modern quilt category and the Best Machine Quilting ribbon.

The quilt is called Main Sequence and, briefly, it's a quilty interpretation of astronomy's Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, which illustrates how the visible color of the light from stars changes as the brightness increases (from bottom to top) and as the temperature increases (from left to right). So cooler, dimmer stars emit a more reddish light and hotter, brighter stars emit a white or blue light. (Our own sun is somewhere in the middle, emitting yellow light.)

Detail

There are a bazillion more pictures of it in the original post on my own blog, but I just wanted to point out that this was one of those situations where the vagaries of 10 people using their stash worked very much in the quilt’s favor. I asked for a solid navy background for my blocks, thinking that the various brands people might use would be indistinguishable and I would have a single solid color background. As the blocks started rolling in, it rapidly became apparent that “navy” means something slightly different to everyone, and I realized it would look odd to make all the negative space blocks the same color when the backgrounds of the star blocks were clearly different. So, I ordered a bunch of cuts of dark blue solids from a range of manufacturers and went with it. It turned out that this was a happy accident that really added to the quilt, and in fact the feedback I received from the judge commented on how much depth the range of blues added.

Closeup of your ribbons!

I made this quilt to cuddle up with on the couch, but doesn’t it look glorious hanging there as a show quilt? I am planning to enter it into a regional (larger and juried) show this summer, but whether it gets into that one or not, I’m going to feel so decadent cuddling up with an award-winning quilt from now on. So, THANK YOU ALL AGAIN for all my beautiful blocks, and don't forget to refer to yourselves as "award-winning quilters" from now on!

~Sylvia (2014 Hive 7, 2015 Hive 3)