Our Fourth Round Robin

In earlier posts I have been showing you my quilts that have resulted from an international group of friends who have been making round robin quilts together since 1997. We get together at the New Zealand Quilt Symposium, which happens every second year, to reveal the project we have been working on since the previous Symposium as well as to plan for the next one.

For today I am going to show you my quilt from our fourth round robin, The Cryptic Sizzler, which we began in 2003. This time our fearless leaders had planned a strip quilt. The owner needed to select one fabric and then make four 71/2" blocks. For the next few "rounds" we were directed to make a strip (or strips) that would be 36" wide (or was that 35"?) - the size of the blocks in the strip varied with each round and there was also some added cryptic comment that needed to be heeded in the making of the strips. The last robin had the challenge to put together all the strips and then add a border as necessary.

By now we had been working together for a number of years and thought we had worked out what each robin's favorite colors/styles were. I decided to up the challenge for my friends by choosing a fabric in a color-way that I had not frequently used, brown and black. And because my fabric had a distinct motif on it I also named my quilt upfront "Savannah Snapshot" to give the robins some direction in making the pieces for it.

Here is what I got back in January 2005 when we all met up in Auckland:

This is a photo of when it hung in the Asheville Quilt Guild show and, as you can see, it won a ribbon (second place in the group quilt category) so that was exciting.

Of particular note is the larger light central portion - that was a combination of three strips. The top portion was the hill scene, then came a pieced strip and finally the strip with the elephants. Another point of interest is that since the name of the quilt contained the word "snapshot" I made my original four blocks (the ones in each outer corner) to look as though they were photographs stuck in an album. Later another quilter made her strip to look like a strip of film negative.

Here you can see a close up of how the elephant area was quilted. Cheryl traced each of the elephants and then quilted the outline in the yellow on point squares above.

For the corner blocks I used patterns from Margaret Rolfe's wonderful book, A Quilter's Ark. And also note the care with which the robin fussy cut and pieced the feature fabric.

So that is the story of how we came to make The Cryptic Sizzler, our fourth round robin.