Wednesday 16 October 2019

Up and down and up and down

I have been playing around with my dark blue squares, seeing what happens if I send them in different directions.
 I quite liked this, but for the moment have gone back to working through the orginal plan, building out the top right hand part.  As I work down from here, those blues may go down again, or they may keep going up. 
Piecing is a bit easier now as I have reached a straight edge across the bottom, so I'm going to make one more big piece and then join them, instead of dragging the whole thing to the machine every time I need to add a couple of squares.  

Saturday 12 October 2019

When in doubt, blog

Many thanks to all the commenters on my last post who suggested this could be asymmetrical.  Why that hadn't occurred to me, I don't know, but it hadn't.  As soon as the suggestion was made, though, I knew that was the answer.  That's the beauty of blogging - when your brain isn't working as well as it could, someone else can pick up the slack and give you the perfect answer.
I haven't unpicked anything, but decided that what you now see is the top left corner and filled it in accordingly.  I realise looking at this photo that you can't necessarily telling I am going for asymmetry, but hopefully by next time it will be more obvious.

There are a lot  more pink strips now.  They are entirely practical - just helping match things up when I need it.  Cutting the squares freehand means that the tiny discrepancies in size mount up over a bigger area of piecing.  I could trim more but I kind of like the way the strips chart the construction of the quilt - a bit like visible mending on your clothes.

Monday 7 October 2019

The pitfalls of not planning

I'm moving happily along with this flowery trip-around-the world-ish top.  Very happily, in fact.  However, I have been focusing on the bottom half and working my way slowly up the sides but pretty much ignoring the top.  The logic has been that I will keep moving up and eventually everything will come together nicely.

To be fair, I think that is the case.  What I hadn't given any thought to until today was what size that was going to give me. If you figure each floor tile as being 13", that already gives me a length of 60" and more.  
Looks like this might be quite big by the time it's done!

On another note, you will see I have added in a couple more big squares of the red birds and that I am letting them interrupt the flow of the diagonals.  

This is now pieced into several biggish chunks.  I thought I would sew them all together but I might hold off, in case I need to lose some length somehow.  Mind you I like what I've done, so it would have to be a last resort.