Acid Trip Quilt - Cubist Yin-Yang

I was originally calling this quilt "Pick-Up Sticks/Acid Trip", but as I work on it, my pick-up sticks inspiration is fading, while the acid trip associations are getting stronger. 

playing with color-blocking

Incidentally, I have never dropped acid, but I've talked to people who have, and been told the feeling is like a mix of synesthesia, emotional vastness, and that strange hallucinatory feeling of being very tired and jet-lagged and hungry, while listening to On The Floor at the Boutique rather loud... which I have experienced.  I was so happy and floaty, and certain noises made my heart jump and my brain twist, and the beat-drop was like jumping off a high diving board and never hitting water.  It was a very cool feeling.  But I wonder: why drop acid if you can feel awesome just by running yourself ragged and exposing yourself to funky sounds...? My method doesn't fry the brain or get you sent to prison (although the risk of being taken advantage of while you're out-of-it is about equal). 

Anyway, I'm calling it the Acid Trip quilt, now.  Here are the posts, so far:
1. String Piecing (Pick-up Sticks/Acid Trip)
2. Pick-up Sticks/Acid Trip coming along

Once I have enough units to make a few blocks, I begin to think of design.  How shall I put these blocks together?  I have my syllables, my words, but what shall the grammar be?  I take a book of graph paper (made by a friend) and doodle a bit, drawing in the blocks in ABAB/BABA format: so the top row is Block A-Block B-Block A-Block B, and the second row the opposite. 

With colored pencils, I play with arrangements.  I decide that a whole quilt of all colored blocks would be overwhelming, like a club mix that's all crescendo and no andante.  Even acid trips have wells of space (or so I'm told).  So in this quilt, black units interspersed with colored units relieve the eye. 

Then, a bit of Yin-yang enters the design:

I color a bunch of black blocks in the lower right corner, thinking they'll ground the work, but they seem to unbalance it instead.  To balance things out, I center colored squares in the black blocks, and (in the opposite corner) black squares in the colored blocks: it's conceptually like a yin-yang, but with right angles everywhere.  I imagine the density of the black corner breaking into color bit by bit, like children released from school and running into their summer, leaving stodgy uniforms behind. 

Now remember how each string-pieced unit starts with a light strip like a backslash running diagonally from corner to corner?  So in the finished quilt design, there's a colored backslash with no black units, in between the dark corner and the sparsely dotted corner. 

I calculate how many of each block and unit I'll need. 

Then it's off to the Mill End Store to buy black quilting cotton.  I pick up several fat quarters in black with different prints and textures.  It's the most boring purchase I've ever made there, and even the cashier comments that it's not my style! 

But it's all for a good cause... those boring black pieces will really make the quilt trippy!