Spiral of Absurdity Journal Quilt

The second Journal Quilt I have made this month is for the theme set on the Sketchbook Challenge site and those journal quilts are all 10" square to keep them in line with all the JQs I've made for those challenges. The theme set for April is Spirals and the very first thing that jumped into my head was the French detective series Engrenages, which in English is called Spirals (and I can't wait for the next series to come!). However although this may cover what the series is about, the literal translation of the word is "gears" which is not quite the same thing. 

So a rethink was in order and I started to browse through my books on patterns (of which I have a world class collection!). I came across one that hadn't seen the light of day for quite some time and that I had bought back in 1993. It's called "Universal Patterns" by Newman and Boles and is one of a series of books about The Golden Relationship: Art, Math & Nature.( and by the way in the process of giving you the link to the book I discovered it has risen amazingly in value!). In it there is an entire chapter describing how to draw spirals, one of which involved constructing a straight line spiral within a square. I could not resist giving it a try and needless to say I started with a 10" square. The spiral is made from the outside edges inwards, and the minute I spotted it in the book I realized just how easy this would be to make in foundation piecing. So that's what I did with my finished drawing, using a collection of Kaffe Fassett fabrics which had been sitting idle in my studio for far too long already.

One of the fabrics had radiating lines and I used that for the centre of the piece as you can see above. I hand quilted the resulting block and added beads along the outlines.

During the entire process of making the piece I kept thinking that I had once heard or read a quotation about spirals and finally it came back to me partly and Googling provided the full quotation which reads:
"Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it". (Vaclav Havel).

And so the journal quilt obtained its title.