The Power of a Really Great Stripe: Maria Shell Workshop + Only Murders In the Building

Good Morning, Stitchy Peeps!  I am feeling clammy and gross and drowning in mucus quantities that have not been seen since the ectoplasm in the movie Ghostbusters.  I have an appointment at Urgent Care in an hour and a half, fingers crossed that whatever ick I've got is something that they can treat with medication.  Most likely it's COVID since my son just had it and I started getting sick several days after he tested positive, but my husband is just as sick as I am and he has tested negative for COVID four times.  Blech, blech, BLECH!

Meanwhile, here's what my design wall looks like three days after Part One of my 2-part Making Prints workshop with Maria Shell:

My Design Wall, 9 AM on Thursday

Our assignment between classes was to make a bunch of units based on the techniques/"prints" that she demonstrated in class, and put them up on our design walls.  Students are permitted to cut their fabric with rulers, but encouraged to try cutting without rulers in order to create more organic, irregular lines with their patchwork.  I'm cutting my fabric without rulers and finding that it's more difficult than you'd think to cut crooked and sew crooked on purpose!  

My Design Wall, 9 AM on Wednesday

The irregular striped units above were pieced the first day after class, and they incorporate all of the colors from my palette.  Initially we were told to create a 12-color palette, but I asked if I could sneak in more and got permission to do so during the class.  The extra colors allowed me to have three shades of brown instead of one and a royal blue as well as light blue.  I think I have 15 colors going on.  Anyway, when I did this first exercise of randomly pairing up my colors I was really pleased that I liked how pretty much every color looked with every other color in my palette.  I struggled to sew my strips together, though -- somehow even though I hadn't cut them straight, they were annoying me by looking straighter after I sewed them together and pressed the seams.  

Yesterday I was miserably sick most of the day but I was determined to get some sewing done anyway.  I got the gray/red/yellow/teal mirrored stripe and the brown/green stacked stripes cut and sewn together, and found that I did better maintaining the wonkiness of the rulerless cuts through sewing and pressing when working with longer strips of fabric.

Keepin' It Real: Mirrored Stripe In Progress, With Snot Rags

I have no idea whether or how these pieces might fit together into a unified composition.  Maria just told us to make lots of different "prints" and know that some of them might not make it into the final piece and that's okay.  I'm just focusing on the learning the techniques right now, and I have lots more cutting and sewing to do over the next four or five days to get ready for the second half of the workshop.  

Rich Murray's Set Design for Only Murders In the Building

Have you been watching Hulu's comedic murder mystery series Only Murders In the Building?  Starring Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez and liberally sprinkled with stellar celebrity cameo performances, the writing is fantastic and the show is very entertaining.  Moreover, the production design by Curt Beech, and specifically Rich Murray's set design is absolutely gorgeous and I'm obsessed with the way he is using color, pattern, and art to flesh out these characters and create just the right mood and visual environment for this fictitious Upper West Side prewar apartment building where someone just happens to get murdered every season.  My deep dive into making stripes from solid fabrics has me on the lookout for "striped inspiration" everywhere, so I was especially intrigued to hear in an interview with Architectural Digest that the inspiration for the design of Steve Martin's character's apartment came from a fabulous striped velvet upholstery fabric that was used on the couch:

Set Design for Only Murders In the Building, Photo by Barbara Nitke/Hulu

Apparently there are a lot of interior design aficionados out there who are enjoying this series as much for the set design as for the story.  Here's a close up of that striped fabric from Paul Smith that inspired the color palette for this character's entire apartment, conveying "sophisticated older bachelor with great taste, who last redecorated with a professional decorator sometime in the 1990s."

Paul Smith Striped Upholstery Fabric from Only Murders In the Building

This stripe is primarily composed of gray and black, but with all of these other interesting colors slivered in: the deep blue-green that was used on the kitchen cabinets, the darker orange for kitchen wallpaper and a throw pillow on the sofa, and the dark blue for the hallway walls and built-ins.  In the workshop I'm taking, Maria instructed everyone to include neutrals in their color palettes -- we had to have a black, a white, a gray, and a brown.  She feels that incorporating these "boring" colors in with the bolder, brighter colors most quilters prefer will elevate the color palette and make the finished work more interesting, and I think this particular striped fabric and the entire set design for this apartment are good examples of that principle at work.  

Paul Smith Striped Throw Pillows

This is the last inspiration stripe photo before I get back to cutting and sewing.  I'm really smitten with the assortment of narrow stripes on that yellow rectangular pillow!  I think I need to piece some units with some fun stripes like these!

Update: COVID test was positive, Paxlovid Rx has been called in to the pharmacy.  Hopefully the drugs will speed this virus on its way because this quilter has WORK to do!

I'm linking up today's post with my favorite linky parties:

MONDAY

Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts  

Monday Musings at Songbird Designs  

TUESDAY

To-Do Tuesday at Quilt Schmilt  

WEDNESDAY

Midweek Makers at Quilt Fabrication

Wednesday Wait Loss at The Inquiring Quilter

THURSDAY

Needle and Thread Thursday at My Quilt Infatuation  

FRIDAY

Peacock Party at Wendy’s Quilts and More

Finished or Not Friday at Alycia Quilts

Off the Wall Friday at Nina Marie Sayre

Beauty Pageant at From Bolt to Beauty

 TGIFF Thank Goodness It’s Finished Friday, rotates, schedule found here: TGIF Friday

SUNDAY

Frédérique at Quilting Patchwork Appliqué

Oh Scrap! at Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework