Curving again

 Curves, square, curves, square and now I'm back to the curves.

I did this bottom corner first and it turned out okay, so I kept going.

This is three out of four corners done, but the top left just has something sitting over it at the moment.  

I have also pulled another shirt- here's a close up and you can also see it in the two photos above.

It's rather lovely and, more importantly, seems to do the job I need it for.

I played around briefly with something like this.

It's an idea I may come back to (it's a good way to utilise those odd little scraps) but for now I am concentrating on piecing a double row down each side.  I probably should have done ends first, but I like how that run down the left-hand side is looking, so I'm going with the flow. As I go I am thinking about juxtaposition: where I'm happy to have two pieces of the same fabric hit each other and where that doesn't look quite right.  For a long time, I preferred not to let pieces run together but more and more I find I quite like how it looks.

It's all progress, right?

A bit of progress here, though mostly of the one step forward, two steps back variety.  Who cares, it's all progress right?

I have been playing around with my smaller blocks and have sewn some of them into sets of four.  I kind of like how this looks, but there are a couple of issues too.  The first is that I have used almost all the sensible-sized pieces of fabric and what is left is mostly the funny, curvy little strings you get from cutting lots of curves.  I have a good pile of blocks but I definitely won't have enough to go all the way around the centre.  

Not to worry, I wasn't particularly determined to make this symmetrical anyway.  So here is a view with just a single run of curves.   

This is more workable, or would be if the proportions felt right.  As it is I have two problems with it.  The first is that those borders (for want of a better word) seem too small and skinny for the centre.  It shows a bit, I think, in this photo but in real life it's much worse.  They look more like an afterthought than something deliberate. 

I fiddled and fiddled but no version of this pleased me.  Eventually I have started to think I need to go back to that centre and do something to help the two parts sit together better.  I am wondering about heading back from my square to something more circular (again!)  The little blue strip in the top right gives of hint of the direction I am considering. 

One another note entirely, I had several lovely comments on my last post from people I don't know and who are no-reply bloggers so I can't respond directly.  Thanks for taking an interest and bothering to comment- it's always lovely to hear what people think.  

Hardly sewing

I am hardly sewing, no point in fudging the issue.  I thought I might be up and running again but stuff keeps coming up.  So I am posting what I have, and considering whether I can come up with a way to keep both the quilting and the blog ticking over.  

In the nearly three months since my last post, I have had this out of the box a handful of times, mostly to look at it, feel completely stumped, and put it away again.  No rhythm.  Sometimes, though, I moved forward a step or two.

I had a vague plan that involved going around the outside of my four-patch with chunky wedges, to make it back into a circle.  Trying to be realistic, the pile of shirts I was looking at were not going to yield enough fabric for this plan, but I wouldn't quite give up on the idea of a circle, so I went about it a different way.   

It ended up like this.

And then I got stuck.

In the end, I turned my circle back into a square.

Then, as the edges of this picture show, I started playing around with my smaller blocks, to see where they might fit.