Time for another installment of our Butterflies & Bowties collaborative project! Today we are giving the Old Maid’s Puzzle block a modern twist with Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr of Modern Quilt Studio. Their blocks use their latest fabric collection Delight.
From Modern Quilt Studio
When Benartex asked us to use our Delight fabric line to make a block traditionally called “Old Maid’s Puzzle” our first response was that it’s past time to discard the term and the connotations of “old maid.” “Let’s call it Single Lady!” we decided and the whole block
immediately felt different.
We decided to fussy cut the stripe of the Bubbles print in the Field colorway to show how a softly directional print like the Bubbles print can add interest to a block without overpowering it. The small scale of the Spin print is perfect as a background fabric and the Khaki colorway is less stark than white but soft enough to allow the multicolor prints to shine.
The Downtown and Sweets prints were the perfect scale for the smaller triangles in the block. As is the case in many of our lines, we think of fabric lines as multicolored ensembles as opposed to a “focus fabric” and “companion prints.” So one could easily swap positions of any of the multicolored prints within the block and the blocks would still look great.
This approach allows our fabrics to have more versatility in quilts and invites quilters to see our fabrics as easy additions to their projects. Whether you make a quilt exclusively with our Delight line or add a little Delight to a project, you’ll find that the fabrics we design “play well with others” while also adding fresh prints and cheery colors to any palette.
See the full Delight line on the Benartex website and visit Modern Quilt Studio for more project inspiration!
Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr are celebrating their 21st year as professional quiltmakers and co-founders of Modern Quilt Studio, a design studio in Oak Park, Illinois. Bill and Weeks are pioneers of the Modern Quilt Movement, having written the first book on Modern Quilting. Weeks made her first modern quilt in 1987 to rethink the possibilities of the American quilt as being expressive of the time in which we live. Bill began sewing at age 8 and started designing and making modern quilts in 1995.
