Gilding the Lily, Part 1

Gild the lily: To make superfluous additions to what is already complete.

I love classic red and green quilts. You just can’t go wrong with them… or so I thought.

This particular red and green block posed many challenges for me. I learned a lot through the design process. Maybe you can learn something from my experience too.

I became a quilter while living in North Carolina and always intended to honor that fact by making a Carolina Lily quilt. The pattern is, indeed, based on an actual North Carolina wildflower.

While the traditional Carolina Lily block consists of three 4 petaled blooms on long slender stems, a Google image search reveals many permutations. I planned to make a traditional lily pattern until I came across this design in one of my quilt books, Primarily Patchwork by Marjorie Puckett and Gail Giberson, 1975. I loved both the full center flower and the simple urn-like pot.

By sticking with classic red and green on a white background and limiting myself to solids, I thought fabric selection would be a breeze. Not so! I learned it is possible to make mistakes using only two colors of solid fabric.

My first fabric purchase was this beautiful jade green. I bought the end of the bolt because it was such a good deal and I just knew I’d never find that color again. The problem was, by purchasing yards of fabric, I was seriously invested in using it and making it work (even when it didn’t).

Early red and green quilts were made with Turkey Red fabric, a colorfast, cool (bluish) red cloth. In my quest for authenticity, my next fabric purchase was a rich, saturated red.

Here’s what happened when those two fabrics were pieced side by side. It may be hard to see on your computer monitor, but the red and green actually “vibrate” where they meet. This optical illusion occurs when complimentary colors of roughly the same value (brightness or intensity) are placed next to each other. The effect was dizzying, but I thought I could still make it work.

Things got worse before they got better. Watch for Part 2 of “Gilding the Lily.”