Halloween La Passacaglia

I made really good progress on a rosette for this yesterday, so I thought this would be a good time to share some details of this work in progress with you.

La Passacaglia is a quilt designed and published by Willyne Hammerstein in her book, Millefiore Quilts. La Passacaglia is the cover quilt. It's a massive, complicated quilt with lots of tiny pieces.

The design is made up of a series of rosettes of pentagons, diamonds and triangles. The pattern is based on Penrose tilings, which the maths geek in me finds very cool.

While the original quilt was made using traditional hand piecing, I, and most others who have made the quilt since, am using English Paper Piecing.

When I was first getting into blogs and the social media side of the patchwork community in 2016, one of the first blogs I followed was Wendy's Quilts and More, and at the time she was working on hand quilting her own La Passacaglia. I was absolutely blown away by her use of colour, and the intricate design. I started experimenting with EPP myself not long afterwards.

It was only after getting in to fussy cut EPP, through the #fussycuttingsewalong with Naomi Clarke, that I actually had the confidence and inspiration to make my own La Pass. I decided on a Halloween theme, with a limited colour palette of purple, orange, black, white and grey. I received a starter pack of paper pieces from a generous friend on IG, and at the Festival of Quilts last year, I bought the book and some fabrics to get me started.

It's very rare that I follow patterns precisely, and this is no exception. I have a very vague colouring plan that deviates from the colour placement in the original pattern. In general the vision involves blooms of orange and purple in the larger rosettes from more pared back black/white/grey in the smaller rosettes. I am not sharing the plan at the moment because the way I currently have it coloured in isn't quite right - it's too colourful. I am still debating in my head whether I can fix this with careful fabric and fussy cutting choices, or whether I need to reconsider some of the colours. As this is going to be a slow long-term project, I am comfortable deferring some of the decisions until inspiration strikes.

Anyway, I have decided on enough definites to get started. I have been slowly making rosette centres. Here are the ones I have made so far.

I got a bit stuck for a while recently, because I didn't have the blenders I wanted to make the stars. I have decided against fussy cutting all the tiny triangles, that would be too much. I think the quilt needs some plainer pieces in it to stop it getting too crazily busy.
Anyway, I recently purchased the blenders I need so there is now nothing holding me back from making quite a lot of progress without making any more purchases. Except, you know, time and desire to work on this project rather than one of my many other WIPs.

That being the case, I have added quite a bit to this purple rosette in the last couple of days.

I really love how it looks! I made a deliberate decision that this rosette would highlight some heart shapes, and that is working so well.

I have two more larger rosettes started.

I have cut out the diamonds and little pentagons for the next round on the orange one, so now that I have the orange blender, that one is next on the list to work on. Especially as it will be connected to the currently bigger purple rosette by only one smaller rosette, so it will be possible to join them together relatively soon.

I don't have a good name for the quilt yet. I have a few ideas I am playing around with, but nothing that quite fits yet. I will entertain suggestions if anyone has any.

While the book has good guidelines for the construction of the quilt, it doesn't really have a system for tracking progress in such a complicated design. I have got a system I am using, that takes into account the changes I made. It's more in my head than on paper/screen at the moment, so I will need to improve that. I have seen several people superimpose photos of what they have done onto a colouring page of the design. I think having a visual representation like that would be helpful to me.

So that's where this stands at the moment! I have a vague hope I can get it finished by Halloween 2020, but at the current rate of progress, another year after that is far more likely. So expect to see it cropping up in more posts in the future!

Linking up to the Peacock Party at Wendy's Quilts and More, and Can I Get a Whoop Whoop at Confessions of a Fabric Addict.

Thanks for reading!