I am taking part in a challenge on the Quiltart list called the Straight and Narrow. The challenge is to create a piece in which the length is at least five times the width. I am doing a banner which will hang in my church. In liturgical churches we have seasons of the church year and the altar paraments have different colors for those seasons: currently we are in lent which is purple, Easter and Christmas are white, Pentecost is red (we had red for Palm Sunday today), Advent is blue or purple. The rest of the year is called ordinary times and the color is green. So I am doing a banner for ordinary times. I have already done Advent and Pentecost. It will be 18 inches wide and 90 – 96 inches long. I am using silk and it will be fused. I want to do a color gradation from dark blue/blue greens to very light green at the top.

Here is my palette:

Here are the fabrics fused and ready to go:

How do you design and fuse a 96 inch long quilt? Well I had Steve bring another table up from the garage and put it end to end with another I keep here. Fortunately I had a piece of batting that was over 96 inches long. Here is the work area set up ready to go:

First, I decided to make a couple of postcards using the fabrics to see how the fusing and gradation looks. Here they are: