Wonky House Block
Looks aren't everything.
It actually is more of a challenge to look eccentric than it is to be eccentric. I spent the entire day attempting to make a Wonky House Block. This one is not done, and it certainly was a learning experience. This style is also called Liberated.
I think the first thing that was so difficult for me was the randomness. I just couldn't make it wonky to where it would turn out cute. Everything kept squaring up no matter how I twisted it. The top and bottom need re-cutting to sort of twist things one last time, which most likely means adding fabric to the sides. Another thing I am considering is something in front of the house. Its just not there for me.
The second thing was that I was still matching colors. If you look at other examples online, some of the most darling ones are really oddities. Whole quilts of oddities!
Talk about personality! Talk about trust, perhaps even more. Perhaps my personality developed over the years through the various expectations others had for me to be the good student, to be the good teacher, to follow the rules, to color within the lines and also to quilt with traditional standards.
Liberated quilting is probably not as modern as we think. My guess is that women throughout time did what they could with what they had. Because fabrics are natural products & most quilts were made for utility purposes, the 'good' ones or the perfect ones were tapestries that hung in castles, courts or museums. They set the standard of perfection in art. This piece is called "Ladies of Camelot"; the physical representations of the human body are elongated, their faces more stylized as well. I don't think it is wonky as much as it is liberated. Yet, it is lovely artistry, well-planned beauty. I cannot imagine someone looking at this and saying that the bodies are not true forms. It was considered a major piece of decorative art of the Victorian era.
When we look at cultural art, primarily paintings on rock, the preservation is remarkable. It seems to me that if the artists of the time, men or women, were making these liberated forms of the human body or the representations of their world, so must have the blanket or quilt makers been creating these figures with a more liberated expression.
I think with any form of quilting, you don't get proficient with it without practice. I need to make a few more of these wonky houses. I want to push out of the box with wilder colors, or with more of them NOT matching so that even the color choices become wonky.
