Sometimes it just doesn't work out.

Having made a fair sized pile of my little bricks it felt like time today to play around a bit and try out options for 'mortar' to join them together.  And that is where it all went horribly wrong.  I had envisaged using my blue fabrics but when I looked at this properly it so clearly was not going to work.  Here's a sample.

See how absolutely unsuccessful this is?  The background is too busy and the squares don't stand out enough; really not what I was aiming for.  So back to the drawing board.  I still want to use the blues, but will think about other ways of incorporating them.  Maybe they will be bricks too.  

In the meantime I'm looking at more neutral fabrics - I've got a couple of grunge ones that might do: a very pale blue and this dirty cream colour.

I'm also making bricks in a third size (thanks to Mary for suggesting this).  I think I have travelled far enough along the path of big quilts with every smaller pieces.  Time to fight back.

Linking up with Patchwork Times for Design Wall Monday.

A view from the back

Today's Sunday stitching is still my dress.  I'm trying out a mixture of these these beads:

and it's going pretty well, but I want to show the back today, as I really like how it looks.

Saturday photos #29

An evening at the cricket and no, it wasn't in the least bit boring, just ultimately disappointing. 

Building bigger bricks

In the middle of the night, when anyone as tired as I was should definitely have been sleeping, I woke up to wonder to myself why I seem to be working with smaller and smaller pieces.  With the current wall project I just started by cutting a size I liked the look of, but of course once you start factoring in seam allowances things get small pretty quickly.  

This morning I cut some more squares, only bigger this time.

This is what they look like mixed up with the original bits:

and with some turned on their ends.

This is clearly not going to be the quilt I started off thinking I would make, but that's nothing new; I just need to keep going and get to grips with what's going on here.

A lot of little bricks

Making more little square (square-ish) bricks...

I have taken the square shape from the first wall piece and will also play around with adding horizontals as a background, but want a completely different relationship between these two elements.  

Looking at these first pictures it occurred to me that I had arranged all the square with the seam as a horizontal line, but in fact some could be vertical.

Now that I've got something on my design wall (metaphorically speaking) again, I'm linking up with Judy at Patchwork Times for Design Wall Monday.

Something new for Sunday

I'm still quilting Two Hungry Birds,  but no picture this week.  It seems to be going along quite fast, but I realise that's because this is much smaller than Little Elephant rather than because I've put on a sudden burst of speed.

Also, I am starting another dress.  It's cut out and stencilled, so this will be my slow stitching for Sunday this week.  The second picture shows the colour much better.

Saturday photos #28

A walk by the canal on June 16th which was, coincidentally, the first day of the river fishing season.

Here I go again

I have been working quite hard in the last couple of weeks, but not on anything blog-able.  It's been interesting for me to make something without writing about it and the experience has left me appreciating the dialogue that comes with blogging and the way that having to describe/justify what I'm doing  contributes to my creative process.  

Anyhow, the unblogged is reaching its first stopping point (ie piecing is done, or nearly) so I am going to make a slow start on the wall piece that I posted fabrics for a while ago.

I haven't done anything fancy, just started cutting some little squares, but at least I'm up and moving.

Saturday photos #27

Lots of rocks this week, just because I love the colours and the layers.

Happy coincidence

No piecing going on at all here - I'm not even in the same place as my machine, so I would have said I was making no progress on my current wall thing, except that I happened to come across this really lovely wall yesterday...it's even sort of the right colours.

Slow mending day

My slow stitching so far has been in the form of mending my jeans.  I've patched before (though not for years) but now I've tried something new. 

Next up, more quilting!

Saturday photos #26

Heading south.  Spent the whole day on motorways, so I thought I'd see what I could do, just by sticking my phone out the car window or taking pictures through the windscreen. Bit blurry, but I quite like some of these.

Second wall, second go

I've been back in my boxes and pulled a few more fabrics - more blues to balance out all the yellow-y stuff. I think I might still need something much darker and/or much lighter in there but I reckon I could make a start with these and add that in when it needed to be there.  But I still don't know where I'm starting from.  I think something is taking shape slowly in the back of my head, but we shall see.  In the meantime I'm managing to keep busy with the rest of life!