Saturday 19 February 2022

Filling in the centre

As someone who is emphatically never going to do quilt maths, it might not have been the brightest move to start this quilt by building a frame and only then thinking about what went inside.  I got to a solution I was happy with eventually, but as you can see it took a bit of figuring out.

In addition to the question of sizing, it took me a while to find a fabric combination that worked.  In the end the low tech method of just plonking pieces down until something worked got me where I needed to go.  It took a while, as the orange fabric in my checkerboard has a strong presence and wasn't all that inclined to play nice.  I tried prints and plains and lots of combinations but mostly it was instantly clear that they were off the mark.  I also considered a centre with more piecing.  The reason I went with this simple little line of geese was that it seemed to balance some of the busier fabrics nicely.  It also let me introduce several new fabrics into the mix in a painless way. 
This is where I got too.  
This is already big for my tiny space, so I have to move it for photos.  While I am working on it I fold it in half, either vertically or horizontally, and just work on one edge.  It's a strange way of going about things, but so far, so good.

Monday 7 February 2022

Still here, after a fashion, and sewing

 I have still not reclaimed my sewing space - in fact I have pretty much had to vacate the house the past couple of weeks, but am feeling generally positive about the changes I can see taking place.  In the meantime I have borrowed a tiny (and I mean tiny) corner in which to try and push on with a bit of quilting.  It looks like this
I spent quite a while before I started sewing looking at the piles of fabric I shared in the last post.  They went back into the bag and came out again, with various changes.  I reached a point where I knew some of the fabrics I thought were definitely in but still couldn't quite get started.  Maybe it was the change in my sewing situation, but maybe it was just that things needed time to simmer quietly.  In any case, eventually, when I wasn't even thinking about quilting at all, a picture popped into my head.  It looked like this:
so I went ahead and made it.  The orange-y fabric had been messing with my head rather, as it is both a strong colour and quite a busy pattern, but pairing it with the dark blues has balanced it out nicely.  The squares are cut freehand but are about 4-4.5 inches, so this feels like the middle of a quilt rather than the outside edges, so I still have to figure out what goes inside and how to build out.  I've never started with the middle before, so this should be an interesting process.