A "Cool" Oldie

I was doing some printing this week for my distributor, and was updating an old quilt favorite called SNAIL'S TRAIL: 

In my early designing years, when I was doing lots of needlepoint quilt designs, I did quite a few of them in "Amish" colors - blues, greens, purples - that simply GLOW when they are finished.  This is one of those... (although the scanner can never get the right mix of blues and purples, no matter how I try!)

There are lots and lots of squares and triangles on this one, and you really have to pay attention to the graphs to get your swirly snails right!  You can see in the detail photo below how the "snails" are constructed.

And this one was different because the variegated thread almost becomes the background color, as it recedes behind the turquoise, blue and purple swirls.  I've never seen it stitched in other colors, but it would be fun to pick a favorite variegated thread plus three different colors, and stitch it up in a totally unique colorway.  The only stitch used throughout the whole piece is the Diagonal Satin Stitch, so you only have to worry about getting all your snail trails going in the right direction!

Anyway, I'm adding SNAIL'S TRAIL back onto my website (under the American Quilt Collection), so if you're interested in this very cool "optical illusion" quilt design, that's where you'll find it!