Wild Things: Colour Inspiration Tuesday and Link Party

December at Island Batik is Whimsical and Wonky….. and Wild!

The challenge for the Island Batik Ambassadors for this month is Whimsical and Wonky. Well, that pretty much sums up all my quilts…. so would you believe I had the hardest time settling on an idea for this challenge? The hardest time!

But I now have a plan I’m happy with. And I’ve started! I think it should be fun. 🙂

Most importantly…. it will be a project for my son who is starting to feel a little left out because his sister keeps claiming all my quited creations that are too girly for him.

In July I received this pack of 10″ squares of “Wild Things” from Island Batik to use in my role as Ambassador. My boy, who has just turned eight, thinks all the animal skin prints are terrific… especially the sssssnake sssskins…….. sssssss!!!! 🙂 So that is a good ssssssstart.

Want to see what I’m making?

Whimsical: “playfully quaint or fanciful, especially in an appealing and amusing way”

I do love a quilt with a little playfulness. Or humour. Or even a bit of tongue in cheek every now and then. Let’s face it, the Chameleon is basically Whimsy Personified. But I discovered something new this month.  Whimsy is kinda hard to produce on demand. It’s too easy to over think it. Luckily, my daughter accidently rescued me. 

Inspiration struck while I was working on a different design for Make Modern (coming out in January’s issue 🙂 ).  My girl looked at my animal designs for that quilt and announced them to be “tangrams”. I told her to wash her mouth out with soap…. since I had no idea what that meant, it was probably a bad word, right?! haha.

Well, I checked it out, and it turns out that the animals on my Make Modern quilt are not tangrams. But they are reminiscent of tangrams. And her comment got me thinking….. I could actually make an animal quilt of tangrams. And, pre-cut squares of animal print fabrics would be a great place to start such a project. So, game on!

But first. What the blazes, is a Tangram?

The Tangram is an ancient Chinese puzzle made of a square cut into seven pieces like so. I’d encountered the puzzle before but not remembered the name.

The basic idea is for the puzzler to rearrange the pieces of the tangram square to recreate the shape of a silhouette given as the challenge. Like this……

The tangram grew in popularity outside China in the early 19th century, and is now popular the world over as a teaching tool, and as entertainment. And that’s how my daughter heard of it. Through school.

There are several legends and plenty of fascinating history associated with the tangram puzzle.  So if you enjoy that sort of thing, as I do, I encourage you to do some extra reading. Here’s two short legends I like…..

Tangram Legend 1: The Great Dragon and the God of Thunder

Tangram Legend 2: The Sage and the Pane of Glass

A Tangram Quilt Plan

Because tangram pieces can be cut from a square without waste, I decided that a tangram quilt would be a great use of my 10″ Wild Things squares. I will admit, I am not usually the most proficient user of fabric precuts…. they require a different designer mindset to my carefully controlled chaotic way of creating. But this was the perfect answer…… Cut tangrams first. Design/redesign animals later. Yeah!

The first legend above finishes with the assertion that everything on earth can be represented with the seven pieces of the tangram. Well! That’s a pretty sweeping statement, don’t you think?! Surely the Imperial Chinese could not have known of the weird and wonderful wild things to be found in Australia. Hmmmmm…. I wondered. “Can I make an Australian tangram quilt?!”.

So I started looking into Australian animal tangram puzzles. And I found a few. A snake is easy. The kangaroo has a couple of published silhouettes that I like. I found a penguin that looks like the Australian Little Penguin. There is an ostrich solution that easily passes for an emu. Similarly, I have commandeered something I don’t know what it was – a mammal of some kind – to be a brush-tailed possum. Turtle and tortoise tangrams are pretty common. But that was about it.

No platypuses. No bilbies. Wombats, echidnas, sea lions, cockatoos and cassowaries are also too far off the beaten tangram track. Really?! – Where are all the Aussie tangram experts?! Can Australian animals be reduced to tangram silhouettes? I found basic crocodile/alligator and koala tangrams that I “improved” to be more to my liking. But for the most exotic animals I was on my own. Of course, this was the most fun!

I love making up my own!

My list of Australian tangrams I have settled on for my quilt (I think) are:

• kangaroo
• emu
• snake
• crocodile
• sea turtle
• sea lion
• eel-tailed catfish
• possum
• koala
• bilby
• platypus
• wombat
• fairy penguin
• cockatoo
• echidna
• cassowary
• freshwater turtle

And this is where I’m at…..

This week I have been sick as a dog. Or should that be a dingo?! Anyway, I have been too ill to do anything much beyond parenting, and with hubby Paul overseas again, even that has been no mean feat. In Australia, Christmas and summer break-up happen all at the same time, and it makes for a pretty insane period about now when you have school-age kids.  

But with the little time and energy I have had left, I have cut the pieces for my Australian tangram quilt. The pile of triangles centre left below are my tangram pieces, with fusible webbing on the back to be appliquéd onto the quilt top. The bottom pile of pieces are 2.5″ strips for binding. And the remaining pieces are for a pieced border.

I stitched the binding strips together to make a scrappy binding. I think this is the very first time for me that the binding for a quilt has been done first. Normally I don’t even audition binding fabrics until the quilting is done. 

I also started stitching the border units together.

Then I organised my tangrams. Here are my 17 piles of 7 tangram pieces each. I decided that I wanted the tangram animals to be made of seven different skin prints each to give a scrappy look. 

Then I arranged the tangrams into the animal shapes. Here are a few of those that I didn’t invent for myself….. you’ll have to come back next post to see some of the more exotic ones. 

Hopefully I will have a quilt top to show you later this week, now that I’m feeling brighter again. Or at least some significant progress. And I’ll try to get back to the comments and blog visiting that I had to let slide (sorry!).

But, now it’s time to see last week’s feature

This week Andrée of Quilting and Learning – What a Combo! shared the first quilt she ever made. A pink Lone Star. I love the comments she added…. especially about not following the “rules” when making quilts. It is amazing what you can achieve if you don’t know it can’t be done.

And of course, Mary of Made by Marney is the Queen of Whimsy. You can see the December Christmas Whimsy she linked up here.

If you were featured, you can find a badge of honour here. My sincerest thanks to everyone else who linked up last week too.

Link up to the Chameleon’s  Linky Party this week and show us your projects

Tell us – what are you working on, or have recently finished in your sewing room? We want to know so we can visit and be inspired. Link up a blog post, an IG post or simply a photo from your computer.  See if you can get the Chameleon to turn quilted with happiness. We’d love to see your quilting colours!

Guidelines:

• Link up your latest or recent quilt/sewing excitement. All quilt construction stages welcome – finished quilts, quilt blocks – even fabric pulls! Or inspiration sources!
• You have 50 characters in the link description…. tell us who you are and what your fantastic project is.
• URL links are not necessary to link up…. non-bloggers 100% welcome! If you don’t have a URL, you can link up with just a photo.
• Take a moment to visit some friends who came to the party – leave a little love and make their day. And a link back to Clever Chameleon is always appreciated.
• Do it now……. before you forget!

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Would you like to keep in touch with Clever Chameleon and the fun quilty ideas I design as well as find all over the internet? You can follow directly for email updates, or through Bloglovin’, Pinterest, IG or FB. All your follow options can be found here. Don’t forget to link up all your current quilting projects on Tuesdays at our Colour & Inspiration Linky parties!

The Chameleon turns rainbow with pleasure when he hears from you. I am more reserved, so I will respond in gratitude by email instead. Now that it’s your turn…. Scroll right to the end, leave me a comment and tell me, what do you think? Thanks for connecting!