2023 Month #1 - SFMQG Modern Electric Quilt-Along (QAL) with Patti

March 18, 2023

**ELECTRIC QUILT-A-LONG – 38 x 52 inches**

March 2023 – First month

Welcome to the first month of the Electric Quilt-A-Long for 2023! For those of you who are veterans, I hope you will be able to learn something new about your quilting journey. For those of you who are new or interested, we are happy to have you here and get ready.

INSPIRATION

This year’s quilt-a-long is all about garnering inspiration from perhaps a different place than you have in the past. Over the years, I have read about what inspires quilt designers – some are architects, art teachers and photographers, and pursue other visual means as inspiration for their quilts. Many of you might not know that I am a professional musician and have been playing instruments and singing since I was five years old. I currently work part-time as a musician and cantor at my local church. Therefore, I derive much of my life’s inspiration from what I hear rather than what I see. When I hear music, I can see colors in my head of how each instrument and voice sounds. To me, a piccolo is a bright yellow sound and a tuba is dark brown. I have a lady in my choir with a rich caramel-colored voice.

I was listening to music while working several months ago and one of my favorite pieces comes from unlikely sources: poetry and music. My inspiration initially came from a poem by Walt Whitman titled “I Sing the Body Electric”.

It celebrates the amazement of how wonderful our bodies are (it’s worth a read). At the time, I was also listening to music from the movie “Fame”, a fictional chronicle of the New York School of the Performing Arts and as part of the final concert at the end of the film, the students perform a song called “I Sing the Body Electric” (which features singers, actors, and dancers from the school, led by the amazing late Irene Cara). .

While the words are different from the Whitman poem, the music and lyrics captured the joy of performance: songwriter Dean Pitchford explained how it came together: "I wrote the first verse in the course of a walk that I was making from my apartment to a friend's dinner party. I had been working and working on this idea of how we were going to finish the motion picture Fame and what was going to be written about, and I knew that we wanted to write something that would be there for an orchestra, but for a rock band as well, and for a gospel choir and soloists and that would involve dance - it had to be a lot of things to a lot of people in order to showcase all the abilities of these kids in the high school of performing arts. And on my way out the door I hit on this line from the Walt Whitman poem, I Sing the Body Electric, and on the walk, I wrote the whole first verse: 'I sing the body electric, I celebrate the me yet to come, I toast to my own reunion, when I become one with the sun and I'll look back on Venus, I'll look back on Mars, and I'll burn with the fire of ten million stars. And in time and in time we will all be stars.' I got to my friend's apartment, and he opened the door and I said, 'Don't talk to me! I need a piece of paper!' I went into the bathroom, and I put the lid down on the toilet and I sat down on the floor, and on the toilet paper, on the toilet lid, I wrote all of what I just said to you. That came that way."

This year’s Quilt-A-Long will embody the spirit of design while being inspired by music and words. You have two options:

Option A: You can follow along with the prompts for the Electric Quilt-A-Long, making any variations you wish along the way; or. . .

Option B: If you are inspired by a piece of music or poetry, you can adapt that to make your own personal design. (please email me your idea so we can follow along with you).

If you are pursuing Option A, you will need approximately 2 ½ yards of the dark background fabric and various scraps and fat quarters for the rest of the quilt pieces.

(I used various scraps of low volume light fabrics for the stars)

This month’s prompt for Option A: you will be making seven “wonky stars” for your quilt using your background fabric and low volume neutrals/lights. The size of the unfinished blocks will be 11 inches. I started with four inch squares so you don’t have to bother with all the calculations on the tutorials. As you can see, each star is unique!