Stars in a Time Warp: Fabriholic!

I have been faithfully keeping up with the weekly Stars in a Time Warp blocks.  Barbara Brackman's weekly lessons on fabric history have really encouraged my already fervent love of fabric!  My stash of reproduction quilting fabrics is growing, and I'm going to need more storage space.  I see many more reproduction-style quilts in my future!

These eccentric prints are made by creating wavy or eccentric lines on the printing cylinders.  I have had eccentrics in my stash in the past, but came up empty when it was time to make these blocks.  Oh horrors - another trip to my LQS!  The two prints featured in my stars are from Moda's Collections for a Cause 2015, which benefits the Texas Quilt Museum.

 

Next up, we have some neat stripes.  Since my blocks are only 4 inches, I had to find stripes of a suitable scale.

 

Now the Stars in a Time Warp blocks are focusing on one of my favorite types of fabric:  chintz.  These blocks represent white ground chintz, a style of fabric with multicolored figures on a white ground.

 

Blotch ground chintzes reflect a trend away from the light backgrounds of earlier chintz fabrics.  The fabric printing processes of the time often resulted in poor registration between the multicolored figures and the dark background, hence the term blotch ground.

 

Fancy machine ground chintz fabric has finely printed designs in the background instead of solid color.  The small background dots are called picotage.  (click on the picture for a larger version)

 

I now have a stack of 48 blocks and I've been daydreaming about how I will eventually assemble them.  This is a year-long BOW, so there are still plenty of fabric styles to learn about and drool over!