If you ever walk past our studio in Newberry, you'll almost always see at least one quilt in progress on the design wall. Sometimes there are two or three hanging scattered around the building. Mitzie is often working on a new pattern while she's still finishing the last one. I've noticed something about that. The design walls seem to talk to each other.
Sometimes looking at the creative process reminds me of jazz. When the greats are working on something that is still finding its shape, the instruments sort of start talking to each other. Maybe the trumpet plays the melody, then the piano answers it, and together they take the song somewhere nobody planned at the start.
Watching Mitzie work reminds me of that. She takes a basic melody, adds harmony, and turns it into something far more complex.
If you've seen Hush Punk, her most recent pattern, you'll hear the same conversation in Sly Spark. The half-rectangle triangle is at the heart of both. It's a humble little unit, just a rectangle sliced on the diagonal, but when the blocks play off each other, and the colors start to move, it stops looking like a shape and starts feeling like motion.
I'm writing this during the first September Color Flow Retreat. We've spent the whole week looking at color and playing with it. We talk about saturation, value, ROYGBIV order, and placing the light fabrics together to build a focal point. All great art acknowledges the rules and then looks for ways to break them. Sly Spark kind of rejoices in breaking the central rule. The dark colors sit right in the middle, surrounded by everything lighter. I call it the egg yolk, a dark, dense center that the rest of the design builds around.
It's a small change with a big effect. Instead of your eye landing softly on the lightest point, it drops straight into that center and works its way back out. That's the spark part. It catches you before you're ready.
So if Hush Punk taught your hands what a half-rectangle triangle wants to do, Sly Spark is where you get to answer it back, a little sharper, a little sly, with the color story turned inside out.
When you are ready to try it, we also offer the BeeLiner 4.5 Ruler for trimming your little SQRTs. Mitzie created a video for how to use the ruler.
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