Not a lot going on here

I'm just dropping in here to say that I'm not really doing much sewing, though I have nearly finished prettying up my wee house so hopefully I'll be back to it fairly soon.  I am hand quilting still, just not piecing, so who knows, my next post may be a new start, or a finish.  

In the meantime, I've popped up a post on AHIQ, winding up my go at the Red is  a Neutral challenge.  

Also, apologies to everyone who commented on my last post and to whom I haven't yet replied - normal standards will be resumed as soon as possible! 

Progress and a sigh of relief

I have been all around the houses with this quilt, but I have finally moved it on a bit.

Since I last posted about it I have contemplated adding smaller blocks, adding a darker block, adding sashing using my darkest red shirt.

I also spend a lot of time pondering why I felt the need to do anything.  After all this is a perfectly satisfying block and a whole bunch of them just sewn together in a perfectly straightforward way look rather lovely.  Yet I couldn't quite bring myself to do it.  I needed to tinker.  I needed to make it my own in some way. 

I rather liked the smaller block (it's 6.5") but only till I thought about how many I might need to make.  The grey didn't add anything, so the red shirt seemed like my best option.  Just to be sure, I went back through my boxes and found this, mucky greeny-brown, which also seemed to be making a case for inclusion.

 In the end I have ended up with this.

I would concede that this is only the tiniest tweak and am not even claiming that it looks better than it would have done without my butting in, but somehow I feel much better and there is a lesson for me in that.

I might add a border or I might stop here. Tomorrow I'm hoping to sew the final seam on it (currently it's two big chunks) and then I'll see.  Right now I'm mostly just feeling relieved!

At least I'm quilting

I'm still not feeling the piecing, though I have made four more blocks.  I could just sew them together and call it done but really I'd like to find a way to make myself love the end result so I'm letting it stew.  In the meantime I am fiddling about with scraps, doing a bit of dressmaking and quilting Taking Flight.  I'm well along the way with the quilting - everything inside the blue border is done, so I've just got the border itself and then one more round of blocks outside it.

I decided to try something new-to-me in the border and am drawing, freehand, a winding stalk with little leaves, which echo the pieced leaves in the body of the quilt.

 Here's a view from the back.

I wasn't sure if this would be okay but I rather like it.  Good think really since I definitely don't want to  do any unpicking!

Now I'm bored

One minute you are happily chugging along, making strip sets, chopping them up, marvelling at the new patterns they make when reassembled, next minute...I got my blocks out this morning, laid them out, as is my habit and suddenly thought, 'no, I'm over this now'.  Short attention span, see?

However, I have this group of bits, which still pleases me and I am thinking that one more row would get me within spitting distance of a reasonable size (floor tiles are 13" square, so I'm somewhere between 60" and 65" across at this point). So I will keep going, at least until I have made four more blocks.

This isn't any sort of deliberate layout and I will sew them back into squares before I worry about that (just too much of a fiddle at the moment).  I am torn between wanting to impose some sort of order and exactly the opposite.  The compromise will be to have a think about the fabric combinations that go into the last four blocks.  After that, I'm not sure.  Maybe I will retrieve my enthusiasm and end up making another 18 blocks, but I wouldn't hold your breaths!