A lighthouse moment

No movement on my sugar and spice quilt, but I finished the last of the cushion (or pillow) covers that I started last summer.  Or rather I thought I had finished but now that I look at it on the screen I am thinking I'll go back and add some stitching to the light.

My intention is to make some more of these; I have at least one more lighthouse quilt in my head, but I rather enjoy picking a single lighthouse - this one is South Foreland.

The back is a shirt.

It all needs a good iron, but of course I don't know where my iron is.

Melting ice cream

Putting my blocks together on the floor it became pretty clear to me that I don't really want them touching each other - they just blend into an overwhelming mess of sweetness, a bit like a pool of melting ice cream.  In fact, the more I looked at them like that, the less I liked them and as I went to bed last night I was wondering about sticking the whole lot in a box and hiding it at the back of the garage.  

However it's not in my nature to let myself off the hook, so today I got on with adding a bit of something more, to see if I could get to somewhere I felt happier with.  The black print seems to work well

and, digging in my boxes for something with that emerald green from the magpie fabric (didn't find anything) I came across a white-based print that also seemed to fit. 

I have been playing around with combining the sweet colours and these two and don't mind the result, especially when I up the quantity of bird shirt I'm including.   At the moment I don't love it but I don't hate it either.

It seems a bit bloody-minded to buy a pile of ice-cream coloured shirts and then complain that they are too sweet, so I will stop doing that now, but I'm thinking that I may still need an extra something...

Sugar and spice

I started off thinking I might keep this quilt really, really simple and used scissors to cut some square-ish bits. I let the size be dictated by the magpie fabric - this was as big as I could get before I started hitting another bird.

 I used this as a rough guide for some more.

At some point, still just cutting squares and not making any decisions beyond that, I noticed a couple had fallen on top of each other.

So I followed that thought, which got me here. 

I should add a disclaimer at this point, to the effect that no fabric was ironed in the making of this block.  I would iron, if only I could remember where the iron had been tidied away to.  Ah well.

I made some more.  I am cutting with no attempt to keep things straight/neat for the moment.  At some point I will probably add strips and wedges to square up before I try joining any of these together.

Now, I like these but a whole quilt would be too much for me.  Too much sugar in one place.  So I need to find some spice, or contrast, which means either a slightly mismatched colour, possibly, or some choices which extended the value range.  I have added in the bird shirt I bought a few weeks ago, but need something dark now.  Obviously I have the black fabric with the flowers but I haven't figured out yet how to use it.  It could just go into the mix with everything else or I could use it in some other way.  For now I'm just mulling things over, as there's no great hurry.

Feeling summery

I know that the process of selling and buying a house works a bit differently in the US but here, once you are on the market, nothing else can happen until you have a buyer.  So I had a plan for this hiatus and to be fair it was not a bad plan.  In fact elements of it will probably still happen.  But in the meantime I decided a bit of shirt shopping was in order.  

I found these

and, hanging all together on one rail, I found these.

It is lovely and sunny here at the moment and they made me think of ice-cream.  Not a palette I have tried before or would have thought of in other circumstances, but there they all were, calling my name.

So I took what life offered me, scooped them up and packed them into my extra-large shirt-shopping bag.  

Back home I have had a dig around in my boxes and come up with something that might work.

It's certainly worth a go.  

Taking Flight: done and dusted

Hooray!  Just when I needed it, I have a finish and I don't know whether it's just because everything else has stalled or not but I'm really happy with this.

I like the wonky string blocks, I  like the places where the corner triangles make little butterflies, I like my blue border with its freehand vine quilting, I like those funny little leaves. Yep, I pretty much like everything about it.

Here's a peak at the back

here's the binding, which is a lovely Cloud 9 print

and here's a closer shot that lets you see all the lovely shirt fabrics properly.

The details:

I started this on 9th May and finished piecing on 4th July 2018.

It reached the top of the quilting queue on 12th March this year and was finished on 8th May.

I started with, I think, 4 shirts but also a pile of squares cut from other shirting (that's where the pretty yellow check came from) plus the Charley Harper piece with the swallows and everything else was pulled from stash.

The wadding is organic cotton and it is quilted using a selection of perle no 8.

It is 60" x 75", roughly speaking.

A bit of binding

Today I am starting to bind Taking Flight, which feels like a big achievement right now. In fact, I shall see if I can take a couple of days over it, just to prolong that feeling of satisfaction at nearly reaching an end.  

I am also thinking a lot about piecing, but not doing any.