Night and Day

My Vintage Bow Ties blocks are now part of my next quilt in the June Bride series.  When I studied the bow ties on my design wall, I started thinking of the great musicals of the 1930's and 40's - and specifically "The Continental," the 22 minute dance sequence with black and white costumes from The Gay Divorcee.   My design grew from the vision of the dancers coming down the steps of the set.

 

The new bow ties are made with sheet music prints. I originally designed this to have complete blocks, but I accidentally made the blocks twice as large as planned.  Once I had them in front of me I realized the top tie would have been way too small, so I adjusted my plan and cut off parts of the blocks to space the ties down the 24" strip. The provided blue-on-black fabric went into the black squares of the checkerboard borders. The light blue silk pieces on the sides are made from what I dyed when I was working on Carolina Waltz.

 

The concentric circles are supposed to remind you of records.  The smallest circle is 1/2 inch in diameter.  (Yes, I have circle templates that small!)

The most fun for me was quilting with silk thread on silk fabric.  I did have a bit of an issue with distortion, particularly on the wider right side of the piece.  I used two layers of batting.  The extra thickness contributed to the problem.  Now that I've seen how this happened, I would only use one layer next time. 

In this next photo you can see how the directional lines of the quilting form squares on point.  

And to finish off this post, I am embedding a YouTube video of Fred Astaire singing "Night and Day" for Ginger Rogers, also in The Gay Divorcee.  My mother had the original sheet music and I used to play it on the piano for her to sing.  The video is long but if you make it to the very end of the dance, you get to see her land oh-so elegantly on that bench. And what a great dress! (designed by Walter Plunkett)