I’ve found the concept of negative space somewhat difficult to grasp at times, and some of the quilts I’ve submitted to the ‘Use of Negative Space’ category in QuiltCon probably didn’t really belong there. (The judges said as much in 2023, although Fanfold was awarded second place in this category in 2021.)

Breakthrough is my attempt to get it right – to make a design that balances positive and negative space, using colour to play with the push and pull of light and dark. The name describes the design itself and what I felt I’d achieved after finishing it!

When thinking of what I might make for submission to QuiltCon 2025, I looked through all my quilt designs for inspiration. Sunday sketch #285 is one I really liked and had thought about making for a while. The opportunity to tackle negative space convinced me I should do it.

Here’s the original sketch, which I posted in December 2021:

You can see a few differences between the original sketch and the final quilt, which often happens when I make quilts from my own designs. I was keen to use fabrics from my stash rather than buying anything new, so I reduced the yardage required by changing the number of blocks in the design from 25 (in a 5 × 5 layout) to 16 (a 4 × 4 layout). I had some bright orange and cream solids that fit the bill, and I really liked the way the two colours worked together. (I don’t know what the actual colours are; they’re probably Kona, but I never matched them to my colour card. Possibly Kona Bone and… Torch? or Flame? I’m not sure.)

I flipped the design so the darker background appears in the top left. I also switched the orientation of the blocks. In the original sketch, the blocks have the small hourglass shape at the top left and the larger parallelogram at the bottom right. But that felt too heavy once the background colours were switched. See the difference in the two versions below? I opted to make the one on the right. (It’s essentially the original sketch rotated by 180 degrees, with the colours changed.)

   

The middle part of my final design is the same block repeated 16 times. Each block contains a small half-square triangle, a large half-square triangle with a single snowball corner, and two rectangles each with a single snowball end. (Cotton & Joy’s tutorial has nice clear pictures of a snowball corner, in case you’re not sure what I’m talking about!) The colour placement is the same in all the blocks, so I could batch-cut and chain-piece all the units really quickly and then assemble them really easily. Cut cut cut, piece piece piece, press press press! It’s my happy place 🙂

Once the centre section was done, I just added large borders and two half-square triangles in opposite corners, to give the impression of a diagonal line running right through the design.

Breakthrough was quilted by Valerie Cooper of Sweet Gum Quilting, who used vertical straight line quilting. Luckily my seams were straight enough to make that work!

I faced the quilt using Cotton & Bourbon’s excellent quilt facing tutorial. I originally tried (in vain) to do a mitred facing, so that the diagonal line on the front of the quilt would extend to the back, but I just couldn’t get it to work well (at least, well enough for me). But I did match the colour of each side of the facing to the colour of the border.

I named this one ‘Breakthrough’ because each half of the quilt has a different colour breaking through the overlaid design – but also because it felt like a personal breakthrough to finally understand the concept of negative space and to use it properly!

I’m excited that Breakthrough has been juried into QuiltCon 2025 and will hang in the ‘Use of Negative Space’ category in Phoenix. If you’re there and you see it, say hi from me!