OMG! It's a Quilt!

One of the Charlottesville Area Quilters Guild chapters to which I belong is hosting a Scrabble quilt challenge. Make a small (no larger than 24" x 24") quilt based around a randomly assigned Scrabble tile. The quilts will be displayed at the all-guild meeting in November. I (along with several other quilters) got the letter G (worth 2 points).

It did not take long after the challenge was announced for the first Scrabble quilt to be shared at the Show and Tell portion of a chapter meeting. Interestingly, it was also based on the letter G. The quilt showed giraffes, two of them to signify the two-point value of a G in Scrabble. I immediately thought, "I don't want to do something like that" in part because I wasn't sure what the quality of my efforts would be and in part because, well, why be ordinary. I started to ponder the letter G.

The first thing that came to mind was the different ways a G could sound. First, there is the obvious way, as in the word "gift." That's a hard G, I think. Then there's the slightly less obvious way, as in the word "generate." A soft G. But wait, there's also the GN combo as in "gnome." I started to write sentences in my head as I walked the dog. Then I thought that Scrabble isn't the only game to include G and its partners in alphabetics. What the heck. It's easier to just show you part of what I came up with.

This is the front or top of the quilt. I say "top" because it turned out that this quilt is not made to hang on a wall. For full effect, it needs to lie flat. On this side, we have both a hard and a soft G.

There's also a second gnome since the one sitting on the soft G did not seem like enough.

 The white rectangles surrounding the center's g are some of the sentences I came up with on those walks.

Chances are that there are some words in those sentences for which you lack a definition. There certainly were for me had I not had dictionary.com handy. I put the definitions of each and every word in those sentences on the back of the quilt.

The rectangles on a diagonal are the definitions. They are carefully positioned to make them maximally useful when reading a sentence as shown here.

See why this quilt can't be fully appreciated if it's hung on a wall. The back also shares two images of the OG, the original gangsta, as demonstrated by Ice-T. The gun he's holding in one shot is just another G.

In terms of all those Gs, I tallied somewhere around 95 Gs. (That would be some deadly gravity.) The front and back background fabrics, for example, represent Gs. There's the human genome on the front

and goats on the back.

There are three fabric Gs; 22 Gs on board game cards; the soft G; the hard G; green thread holding the soft and hard Gs; three Scrabble G tiles; 30 words starting with G written in Goudy Old Style font; 30 definitions of the G words also written in Goudy Old Style font; two Original Gangsta shots, one showing a gun; and two gnomes.

Making this quilt was very much a learning experience. It did not occur to me until I'd sewn the first one on, but the cards and even the sentences could not be taken off and re-sewn. The holes from the first sewing weren't going to disappear, meaning I had better have them in the correct position or else. Rather than sew the binding down, I used a product called Liquid Stitch that a guild member learned about at a quilt show the weekend before. I printed the sentences on a somewhat heavy canvas. which was not a great idea. The only paper I had that I could easily run through my printer was white, and I didn't like the look of it against the pale beige of the letters on the genome fabric. The color of the canvas was perfect.

And, as I expected, all the other quilts shown so far at chapter Show and Tell sessions have been more direct representations of the letter. Some have had some things you might be stretched to connect to a letter, but so far OMG (Oh My G) is pretty much the only one of its kind. Dare to be different.

Finally, if you really want to know the definitions of the G words in the sentences on the top of the quilt, here are the four definition lists slightly more readable than in the shots above.