Locked out

Apologies for blog silence and my failure to respond to (and make) comments - I've had no computer for a little bit. It just switched off one evening and never switched back on.  Now I have one again, but sadly not masses of progress to share.  Current progress looks like this.

I can't claim there's a particular reason for my slow pace, but the weather has been good and the garden has called my name.  It will rain soon, so I am, almost literally, making hay while the sun shines.

A bit of whingeing, a bit of sewing

Whingeing first, plus an apology.  I turned comment moderation on, because I was sick of having idiotic spam comments under my posts.  Somehow that messed with the bit of blogger that sends things to my inbox.  So I read your comment, I ticked that it was a bona fide, not at all bot-sent, quilt-related comment, and boom, it was on the blog but nowhere else.  You might think that getting on the blog is the most important bit, and you would have a point, but I rather fear that there will be a few commenters who haven't had responses from me because it took me a while to realise the inbox version wasn't turning up.  If this has happened to you, I apologise.  Anyway, for now I have removed comment moderation.  My brain is currently quite scattered enough -I don't want to go losing comments left, right and centre!

Anyway...on to the quilting.  Perhaps this is also reflective of my distracted state of mind.  That's to say progress is slow.  Here are just a couple of versions that have been laid out in the last few days.

I have played around with adding a variety of different bits and pieces.  The denim strips with skinny inserts will stay, I think.  The jury is out on those very dark bits at the bottom of the photo above.  

I tried adding bigger bits of that pretty, used-to-be-a-dress print,but they have gone already.  They just made it all a bit too busy for my liking.  

I am still looking at this from all sides and still looking for the best way to put in the extra green.  I only have the two pieces you can see above and enough for maybe one more wide-ish strip which forces me to think carefully. With the benefit of hindsight I wish that the two bits already in the quilt hadn't ended up looking almost the same length.  Maybe I will unpick.  Then again, maybe not!

Which way is up?

I am still working on this from all sides, but realise that the photos are taken from a single point.  This is just because of where the table and chairs are located; I tend to just swivel the chair I am sitting in and climb onto it to do the pictures, where as when I am working I roam all over the place. 

Here are some progress shots.  Mostly these are just bits lying on the floor.  Every so often I go so far as to sew something to something else, but there's still a lot of shuffling. Nevertheless, in the interests of full disclosure, this is how it's been going...

What I want to do next is find a place for another strip of green and dig out some scraps of the dark green I'm using for the geese- I'm pretty sure there are more bits of it somewhere.

Turning things around

Slow progress here. Firstly, I have had covid.  Nothing horrendous, but nobody else in the family wanted it, so I was coralled in the spare room until I could produce a negative test.  I did some hand quilting but that was my lot.  

Once they let me out again,  I pulled out some shirts I thought were worth trying with my existing fabrics, but nothing has really excited me. You can see below a few of the things I tried - mostly variations on blue or green, because that's what I have.  I have also tried random other things - burnt orange, a gold bit, a red and blue plaid.  Nope, nope and nope again.  

I have also considered adding blocks with a variety of different shapes - circles, squares, string blocks but again nothing I feel so sure about I want to waste time, or, more to the point, fabric on trying them out.  

The thing that has worked best so far, in terms of at least letting me take a small step forward, is literally turning things around.  Like so...

There may be disadvantages to working on the floor (weird perspective in photos, for instance) but it makes it really easy to look at a piece from a different angle.  All it took was one big step, the bottom became the left hand side and somehow I could see a way forward. I am thinking I might keep taking sideways steps, so that I end up with a piece constructed from all 4 sides, without an official top or bottom.  I did it once before, with this quilt and it worked well.  

Of course from a practical point of view, I still need to augment the fabric pile but that's a problem for another day.

 

Am I missing something?

 Hmmm.  I have some bits made that I like.  In fact, I have quite a few.  I have been happily shuffling them about on the floor and have, I think, a vague sense of where I want to go.  

I have also done some unpicking and made some bits that just didn't work.  See that green strip above?  That's gone now.  I'm still using the green, but not in the centre of a block that wants a blue strip.  You can get the gist of what I am doing, I'm sure.

But here's the thing, the sticking point of the moment.  I kind of feel I haven't got enough.  Maybe I need another fabric or two, since I have abandoned a couple that were in my original pull.  Maybe I need another shape in the mix.  I can't quite put my finger on it.  What I know is that I shuffle and shuffle, but always get to a point where I haven't quite got what I want next.

I have pulled out a couple of shirts that might go into the mix and am doodling away, trying to think about shapes that I could try out too. Fingers crossed!

Unplanning

This quilt is still the boss of me but I am fine with that.  I hadn't planned to do anything else with the chunky wedge shapes that I used in this and this, but nonetheless happened.

and then it happened again.

I also hadn't planned to start sewing things together straight away, but look what happened next. 

I hadn't planned to use denim. So unprepared was I for denim, in fact, that I had to cut up a pair of my own jeans.  They were a little stained and only fit for the garden, but they were most definitely still in use.  Not any more!  Whoever is in charge, it's still not me.

I am definitely not the boss around here

Well, this is a new experience for me.  I've had quilts tell me what to do before, many, many times.  But I've never been bossed about by a shirt, before I even started turning it into a quilt.  That is what has happened this week.  

I wanted to start working to a colour scheme inspired by a photo, the latest AHIQ challenge.  I had an initial pull from my shirt bag, which looked like this:

and also wanted to dig out the scraps of this green, from my last top.

It all seemed pretty straightforward, until I found this shirt on ebay.

It's lovely.  Just the right shade of green, and with brown and a soft pink running through it.  I was a little smug.  Ha! Did this shirt want to play ball and work with my other greens?  It did not.  It sat on top of the pile glaring at me and absolutely refusing to play nicely.  

I am, maybe, a little wiser than I used to be, so instead of insisting it did what I wanted and forcing the issue, I have given in.  This shirt is not going to be paired with lots of other greens.  Instead I will be pairing it with browns, 

with pinks and with a creamy yellow shirt with fine pink and deeper yellow, and blue-green stripes.

This pile consists of 6 shirts, one half-metre of quilting cotton and a dress made of a beautiful Monaluna quilting cotton that my daughter wore when she was five.  Let's see where it takes me.