Maybe, nearly, almost, pretty much done for now

In a  perfect world there would be a couple of process photos between my last post and this one.  However I have had covid again.  I am perfectly fine but  have been confined to my room so can't get at the camera to retrieve my card.   I did manage to grab my box of sewing on my way into isolation though.  There isn't room to swing a cat in here but moving everything away from the wall so that I could pin my top to it kept me busy and time is the one thing I've had plenty off.

I'm trying to remember how this went.  Three columns were working but clearly not wide enough and I figured I had enough fabric to make a couple more sets of circle-y bits. The one in the top right is made of smaller pieces, partly because it let me use more of the scrappy bits but also deliberately to echo the similar piece bottom left.  

I had enough beige scrappage to run a line of triangles across the bottom and up the right hand side.  Again, this has a practical point - to edge towards a size I'm happy with - and also balances the left hand side.  No more beige left.  In fact almost no more of anything except one strip of tartan, a fair bit of the darkest red and blue stripe and some of the plain slightly pink-y red.  Ideally I would like to add a tiny bit of length, but am not sure this will give me much in the way of options.  I'll need to get back to my floor to know; if I can't find something pleasing then this will be where I stop.  

Not paying attention

You might think that for someone who finishes only a handful of quilts in a year, the moment of completion would be something to celebrate.  I certainly thought that.  Except...some time round about October of last year, I finished a quilt and completely forgot about it.  No blog mention, not even a dodgy photo on instagram.  In fact, the only reason I know when it was finished is the date stamp on the photos. Go figure.

Anyhow, here is my poor, sadly overlooked quilt, which was called In For a Penny (on account of the Coins).

Six shirts (if you want a reminder, you can see some of them here) plus scraps from my big box of random bits, pieced mostly as little strip sets, with the odd hourglass or pinwheel thrown in when I got bored.

Much of the back started life as a front, but at some point I realised I wasn't inclined to quilt it, so took to it with the scissors.  Some of it is in other quilt fronts now, and the rest has made this rather  satisfactory back. 

It was pieced between the end of November 2019 and 3rd March 2020, so it was my final quilt before lockdowns came and ate the rest of the year.  I have to confess that I don't know when I started quilting it, but it was finished on 17th October 2022, so I guess I would have started some time that summer.  

The wadding is organic cotton,the thread is perle cotton, just a random selection that seemed to go, and it is quilted with straight, vertical lines.The binding is one of the last Oakshott cottons that I have been hoarding for so long it's stopped being funny. It was just the right mix of yellow and pink tones.

It might seem, from my utter neglect of it, that I don't much care for this quilt but that's not the case.  In fact I like it a lot. I especially like the interruptions made by the hourglasses and pinwheels, the tiny bits of red and that bottom left-hand corner, which has a whole curvy thing of its own going on.  

Shuffling

Although I have decided I am going down the route of wilder rather than more structured, I find I am still laying my pieces out like this when I start to sew.  They come out of the box in a different order each time but that's okay.  I am aiming to make four long strips before I worry too much about which way round they go together.  

Maybe, once I've got that far, I will need a fifth strip.  I will almost certainly need to add something border-y to to the top and bottom to get to a length I like.  

In the meantime, each piece is having its own little internal conversations.  The one thing I am paying most attention to is how many of the horizontal red plaid strips I use.  As Doris said on my last post that fabric is rather shouting for attention.  So far, I feel that's okay; it helps to stop all the blues and darker tones from mushing too much.  But I don't want it to be the only thing you notice when you look at the completed top.

Every so often, I shuffle everything back together, just to make sure I don't lose sight of where I am going.  This is one iteration. The second vertical row in this next photo has been sewn together.  Apart from that, nothing is finally decided.  Each bauble is stitched to the rows below it, but they don't have final places yet, though I am pretty sure I'll be sewing the left hand row up soon too. 

On a practical note, I am running low on the dark blue plaid and also the batik shirt but overall it still seems like I have a fair amount of fabric.  The last bits may be dictated simply by what's left, but so far, so good.