The Endeavourers’ Reveal Day — Harmony

Another quarterly reveal for the online art quilt group, The Endeavourers. This time the theme was “Harmony,” and I had a hard time coming up with a design. I wanted something that said, “Hello, I am a piece of art,” not, “Don’t mind me, I’ll just melt into the background and thereby contribute to the overall pleasantness of this room.”

I decided to choose a song, and try to translate its harmony into a visual form, with blocks of color to portray its chords. I picked a phrase from Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

If you don’t know the song, here is the first version of it that I ever saw, and still my favorite, by kd lang.

For this tune, I needed all the white keys in one octave, plus one black key, G#. When I visualize notes, I see their location on a piano keyboard, and I think of them in these colors, not in perfect rainbow order. (Since the G# is between G and A, I tried to pick a fabric that was a mottled mix of the two; it looks too brownish in this picture.)

Once I had my color scale, I could build the blocks for the chords.

There are different versions of the chords for this song online, and this is the one I chose.

Chords and lyrics:
[C] It goes like this…
[F] the fourth
[G] the fifth
[Am] the minor fall
[F] the major lift;
[G] the baffled king com-
[E7] -posing
[Am] Hallelujah
[F] Hallelujah
[Am] Hallelujah
[F]Hallelujah
[C] Hal-le-
[G] -lu-u-u-u-
[C] -jah

The chord combination blocks were okay but they looked really bland. I added some machine embroidery over the top to capture the feeling of the music flowing.

The C chord — blue, turquoise, raspberry.

Initially I pictured the blocks on a solid background, and I laid them out a couple of different ways, to capture the phrases of the song:

Arrangement possibility 1.
Arrangement possibility 2.

Both arrangements looked way too bland for me. They would make nice bed quilts, but they’re not very artistic.

Fortunately I had just purchased some bins of lovely fabric at an auction, and in one of them I found four pieces of beautiful silk. Using them as columns gave more interest to the background.

I fused the batik “chords” to the silk columns, and then did just one round of straight stitch around each of them.  More quilting might be nice but I am afraid I will ruin that pretty silk.


“The Secret Chord,” a piece for The Endeavourers’ theme of Harmony.

Detail showing the batik blocks on the silk background.

To me this is a piece that is still more decorative than artistic, but I like it better than when I started.  I would like to add more decorative stitching, but I always say that! I do enjoy focusing on art quilts every quarter, and I always like to see what everyone else has created for each theme.

To see the other responses, please visit The Endeavourers! 🙂

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