Brief pause for a finish

It's always nice to step away from tricky piecing for a moment or two and remind yourself why it is that you bothered in the first place.  

This quilt was made in the summer 2021, as my attempt at the AHIQ Symmetry/Asymmetry prompt.  As regular readers may have spotted, I am mostly, if not entirely unsymmetrical in my approach to quilting, so I took up the challenge of working in a way that felt comfortable but still produced something broadly symmetrical. 

Turned out, this wasn't as uncomfortable a process as I anticipated, though I did have to take myself in hand once or twice. The medallion layout helped a lot, I think, and I sneaked a few little twists in to keep myself happy.  

When I finished the piecing I liked this well enough, but it has turned out to be one of those quilts where the quilting makes all the difference, because now I love it.  The colours are maybe a bit prettier and softer than I would normally go for and there's a lot of flowery stuff going on, but the prettiest, softest, floweriest bits are all from shirts and somehow feel just right. The non-shirt contributions come from a very old Oakshott cotton, which I used for the dark teal strips and some dress-making scraps (the glazed cotton right at the top and bottom).

I decided to quilt triangles shapes right along every strip, echoing the pieced geese.  There were moments (see those little skinny blue strips) when I wondered why I ever thought that was a good idea, but I stuck with it and by the end was jolly pleased that I had.  They don't photograph well, but all those outline geese have added a whole extra layer of movement and texture.

I started piecing this in July 2021, though the central section came from this quilt top, made in 2019.  Finished piecing 9th September 2021.  I started quilting in July 2022.  That seems a long time ago, but I have two quilts on the go and this was the back-up quilt for a while rather than my main focus, so I'm okay with that.  

It was quilted with perle no 8 and the wadding is organic cotton.  The binding is from a bundle of organic fabrics my kids gave me - only 1/4 metre cuts, so I used two different prints, but I like how that looks.

Feels good.  But now I have to stop patting myself on the back and get back to puzzling out my current project.

Done for now

The last column down the right-hand side has gone on and this one is done.  Now it gets to join the waiting-for-quilting pile.   

Sadly it has been alternately way too cold and then way too wet for me to try an outside, washing line photo, so the floor will have to do. Never mind, I think this shot pretty much does the job.  I was right down to my last scraps of dark blue by the time I finished piecing.  I do still have or two checked bits still and could have found a way to use those if I had needed them, but I was pleased I didn't have to go back to figuring out.  Using all the scraps left from cutting curves has made this a slightly fiddly piece to work on, but the hourglasses felt like an elegant solution and, happily they sit well with the rest of the quilt.   The finished piece is (approx) 70 inches long, 60-something inches wide.

I'm off now to the next project.  No stopping for Christmas, since I've only just got properly started again, but I guess the piecing will be happening in fits and starts for the next couple of weeks. If you are taking a break, I hope it is a happy, peaceful time for you.

NB This was made in response to the AHIQ prompt set by Ann in July. 

All the yellows

Ann's newest challenge landed just as I was thinking about what to start next so I have pulled out a great big pile of shirts and dived right in.  Here is a photo of every single yellow and orange shirt I could find, plus some others that seemed to sit nicely with them.

Seems like a good place to start, so off I go.

Tulip Mania, done for now

 And just like that, I am calling this one done.  I spent a fruitless but relatively enjoyable morning yesterday shuffling my bits around, trying different placings for my tulips and trying to figure out how to fill the gaps that result from staggering the square blocks. In the end nothing I did had a significant impact so I just got on and sewed my blocks together.  

I am happier with how this has ended up than I expected to be.  One of the things I have learnt from this is that asymmetry definitely pleases me more than symmetry, so I started liking it more as soon as I figured out ways to break the pattern up a bit.  I like that the string centres are not exactly in the middle of their blue surrounds, so that they dance around rather than lining up neatly and I like that the little strips disrupt the lines of blue.  Mind you, I also really like that central block of tulips, so I guess, as always, that it all comes down to balance.  

Old-fashioned progress post

I had a happy moment this week when I discovered I had more tulip blocks than I had realised.  I had been unpicking upstairs because there was someone working on my fireplace downstairs.  When he finished I moved back down but left said tulips behind.  I think they may just be enough to get me over the line on this without having to sew any more blocks.  That would be a bit of a result. 

Here are two versions I have been playing around with.  I have been struggling with the symmetrical nature of this piece and trying to come up with a way to disrupt that a bit.  This photo is me wondering if I could add something - either one fabric or something pieced into the mix.  So far I haven't found anything that would work and if a fabric doesn't present itself this is rather dead end.

In the second picture I am just trying to use the extra tulips to move the eye around.  I think this may work out better.

Either way, I think this is not going to get much larger; I'm not going to keep going just for the sake of it and even if I haven't settled exactly on a final version, it rather feels like there's not far to go now.

Considering my options.

I am considering my options, but thankfully not in that "where's the seam ripper" way; more just not wanting to commit until I'm sure.  There is a temptation for me to be so glad this is working better than the first layout that I just sew it all together to try and get to a finish as fast as possible.  Instead I am taking a deep breath and trying to give my quilting brain space to do its thing.  Also, as so often, I can see that I won't have enough of the very dark blue fabric to just keep going like this, so I need to build that into my ponderings.

First up, the thought came to me as I got out of bed that I could reverse the two blue fabrics, stripe next to the strings, darker one on the outside.  Like this.

I like the variation and on a practical level it is using more of the fabric that I have more of.

Next up, those tulips...hmm.  They look okay sitting on the edge (last pic, previous post), but are they blowing my socks off?  Nope.  In fact they aren't really drawing my eye at all.  So maybe if I mass them together, like this, they will be happier.

This seems more effective but in turn produces things to consider.  For instance, if I offset the next round of blocks, I am going to end up with gaps to fill, so the question is "with what?"  Ann's comment last time has made me aware that I don't need to offset both vertically and horizontally, so next time these blocks are out I am going to have a play with that idea.  In the meantime, this is what it would look like if I just kept going.

The little strips of strings aren't working for me here, but it was an idea worth trying.  I have a few tulips half-made, that I thought wouldn't be needed but I am reconsidering.  It won't take long to complete them and it is starting to look like the more of them I use, the better.  Also, it will help me to counter the shrinking pile of dark blue.

Off-centre

I am still pretty happy with how my revamped string blocks are going.  Mostly I am occupied with cutting up the originals and adding dark blue edges.  I am doing all this by eye, so the coloured bits are not exactly centred in the blue and no two are exactly the same.  I kind of like that they don't sit in neat lines.   

 I am also taking a bit of time to play around.  I like the blocks offset

I wonder about adding some of the little quarter blocks from my strings...

and maybe a tulip or two.

I need to try this out over a bigger area to see if it really works but at least it feels like I am heading in a more sensible direction now.  

Take 2

I have gone right back, almost to before where I started, if such a thing is possible.  I had in my mind's eye a half-remembered image of tiny bits of colour surrounded by something dark.  I wondered if I could use my string blocks to constitute these little bits of colour.  So, you guessed it, out came the rotary cutter again.  I cut a few little squares (a quarter the size of the original strings).  The original intention was to use each one on its own, but as I played around I wondered about reforming the Os that I had in my first attempt.  Like this.

I have log cabined around these centres, to bring them back up, roughly speaking to 10.5 inches.  The dark blue/black fabric was nearly a pair of trousers about 2 years ago, but the pattern, which had looked fine on paper, was very odd sewn up so they never got finished.  These pieces have been lurking around ever since.  It is very lovely in the flesh, but is, I think, a linen and cotton mix, so slightly unruly to handle.  Never mind.  

I liked these, so I made a few more.

And then a few more.

Very crease-y but otherwise okay.  This isn't a layout, of course, just a bunch of bits arranged for a photo; I will play around once I've got a few more under my belt.  I am getting 4 little bits from each of my original string blocks, so almost nothing is going to waste and hopefully this version will work better than the first, otherwise I will end up working with postage stamp-sized pieces.  ]

Will my tulips work with what I have here?  I have no idea yet and haven't wanted to jump the gun by trying them out.  For now I'm just concentrating on one thing at a time.  

Slicing and dicing

This is just not happening for me.  I don't remember when I last got so comprehensively stuck (actually, I've just looked back and it was 2015!)

Here's how it panned out.  I made another chunk I quite liked.  I tried it on the left, I tried it on the right.  Not happening.  I tried it at the top of the piece I already had.  That seemed like the best thing I had tried.  It looked like this.

I put it away for the weekend, came back to it today and realised I didn't really like it at all.  I tried adding in HST squares, half white shirt, half coloured.  Nope.  I tried using the white shirt with a centre strip, so that it echoed the shapes of the string blocks.  Now, that's an idea that I liked and that has possibilities, but it didn't work here. 

So...I took all three chunks apart.  You can tell I was fed up because I didn't even bother to unpick, I just ran my rotary cutter right along the offending seams.  I have sliced off the dark strips too.  

I don't have any idea what I am going to do next, but that's all part of the process, right?  I am choosing to be okay with the fact that my process currently involves going backwards!

One chunk, two chunks

I still  haven't hit any sort of rhythm with this top, though to be fair last week was unlikely to be the time when that happened.  I do however have a chunk I like.

I am now working on a second piece, using something I have unpicked half of, to see if I can revive it without more unpicking.

I don't envisage it sitting in its current position; that's just the clear piece of floor.  In fact, one of the things causing me issues with this is that I can build little sections I like without too much difficulty but I can't for the life of me figure out how to connect them in a way that pleases me.  

A couple of people have commented about the white fabric.  I should explain that it is actually a shirt with a fine dark (probably black) stripe, so is not as glaring and naked as it looks in the photos.  Why the stripes don't show up, I don't know but in real life it has a different effect entirely.

Slow going, still better than not going at all

It's slow going  here this week, but not because I'm stuck (though I'm not yet unstuck).  It's just the second week of the Easter holidays.  Last week my guys went to cricket camp, thrilled that our lockdown has been lifted enough for this to be possible.  Mind you, normally they would have been inside; this year they played cricket in both driving snow and pouring rain and, quite consistently all week, in temperatures barely above freezing.  Didn't seem to bother them though.  This week, no cricket, so I have to be more entertaining.  

I am sneaking in a bit of tinkering and quite a lot of just pondering nonetheless.  I have to thank everyone who took the time to offer up an opinion on my last post - all those clever ideas whirl around in my head and sooner or later something comes of it all.  So far I have decided to add in both a lighter light (a shirt, basically white with a very fine stripe) and some darker options.  I have also settled on emphasising the 'o' shape with the string blocks rather than the crosses.  This means that if I disrupt the pattern, I will be doing so in a more careful way. 

This is just a little bit where I have reorganised the strings and added in a couple of white squares. It's always a bit odd judging something from a small piece, given that repetition is so important, but you can get my general drift anyway.

Here are the new darks.

And this, in the interests of thoroughness, is a black and white version.  

Beyond this, I have no clue as yet, but I am hopeful that by the time I get a clear run at it again, something will have percolated through and I'll be ready to crack on. 

In the meantime, I am quilting and quilting.

Started, stopped

This is where I am at the moment, but I can tell you before you look at the photo that I don't think it's where I want to be.  

I am happy with the individual components here, but it all feels too congested.  One or two bits are sewn together; they may stay that way, although I'm not ruling out a seam ripper either (though that's not a thing I will do lightly with all those strings).

I don't often do this, but a back and white picture is instructive.

See?  Too much mush.  Of course, in colour the red pops out at you, as does the more acid of the yellows so this isn't the whole picture but I need to figure out a way to create some - what?  Space?  Contrast?  Room to breathe?  What I have so far is not huge, so that gives me room for manoeuvre and I am feeling happy that I had already stopped making strings and tulips.  Now it's time to step up and find a way to make this work just a bit better.

Starting on the bigger picture

This is ticking along now.  Here's a layout using tulips in groups and including a couple more big ones.

I have started sewing a few bits together, starting in the middle and working my way out.  It reminds me of why I don't often make so many small bits before I start joining them: I am poor at keeping track of where things have come from.  In some ways it doesn't matter, since I can always just lay them out again, but after a while that stops seeming like fun. So, if I am to keep going until an end, I need to get some bigger chunks done, to compensate for the fact that I appear to be a disorganised person with a poor attention span.

I have one more little tulip and five or six more string blocks currently under construction, but I am more or less decided that I don't want to keep going with either.  Instead, I am experimenting with dropping in squares of some of the floral fabrics that are in the pieced blocks. If I keep going like this there will be more squares and less piecing around the edges, though I might also consider a pieced border of some description.

For this particular quilt these decisions are being driven by the prompts Ann provided, my interpretation of them and, increasingly, by the contents of my scraps box.  If I want a border of any sort I may have to cut up a new shirt. I don't mind so much if that's where I end up, but I am going to have a good shot at only using what's in the box first.  

Clarelou - the tulips are improvisationally pieced; I looked at a few traditional blocks, did my own little sketch and then just did them by eye.  Nothing is measured as I sew.

Regularity

Today I didn't sew much, although I have made a couple of bigger tulips.  Instead I alternated between shuffling my existing blocks around and hacking away in the back garden where several shrubs have  been allowed to have their own way unchallenged, I'm guessing for around ten years.  It's not a bad mix of activities.  I look and think until I am stuck.  Then I go outside, stop thinking about quilting and hey presto!  Just like that something helpful pops into my mind.

I started off in a fairly orderly way: big tulip in the middle and everything else radiating out.   Then I thought about how much I liked the photos I shared last time, where the tulips were grouped together and added the row of pink flowers.

Off into the garden where I found myself challenging the basic assumptions of this layout.  These little blocks, all being squares, seem to lead naturally towards something fairly orderly.  It's fun to lay them out like this, but was it exciting me?  Well, to be fair, it was exciting the same bit of me that likes to make lists just so I can cross things off, but that's not usually the bit I use when I'm quilting.

So now I am playing around with something more like this.

This is halfway, I would say, between the last picture and where I want to be.  I'm imagining the tulips more in groups and less in orderly rows.  That's the way I like them in the garden and it looks like it's how I want them in this quilt too.

On a side note, if you leave comments on my blog and I don't answer, I'm afraid  that means you are a no reply blogger.   If you include an email address in your comment, or send me one through my email, then I'm happy to respond.

How many tulips make a bunch?

I have been plugging away making tulips - boy are they fiddly!  I have a nice little pile of them now, though, plus a handful that are half-made.  I decided today that I will finish the ones I have started and then maybe think about starting to sew  some of them into bigger chunks.

Mostly when I lay them out on the floor I have been thinking about using the tulips singly, mixed in with the string blocks but I also like them in little rows

and in fours.

If I kept making them for long enough this might turn into a tulip quilt with strings, rather than a string quilt with tulips.  More likely I will run out of beige fabric and that will be what decides how many flowers I end up with.

Actually, I realise that's a bit misleading.  I have two beige fabrics.  Mostly I am using shirt, but there is also a biggish scrap of what might be an Oakshott cotton.  Today I have also used the light, almost white shirt with a tiny, probably red, design (yellow flower in the top right above), plus a very, very pale yellow-y scrap and another left-over piece which is white with a little beige design.  I'm just mixing all these extras in here and there for now, but by the end they may well be all I've got.  

I reckon this is the most I've made for a quilt without sewing anything other than the basic building blocks.  It means that this still feels like a project full of potential, but I also know that if I don't move on to the next stage fairly soon I may end up making bits that are not what I need.  Not enough fabric for that, so decision time is looming.

One big flower

Now I'm getting somewhere I like.  While I was working away making more darker tulips, it occurred to me that I might like one big one that could go in the centre of the quilt.  This would be a cool reference to Ann's inspiration quilt, so the idea pleases me rather.  So I made a big tulip.

Then I made some more smaller ones.  And some more strings.  I have run out of the original gingham but found one that is much bluer that works fine.

Now I am thinking about different layout options.  I wondered briefly about something along these lines

but am more inclined to go  in this direction.

It's not very big yet and there are lots more tulips to make (which is fiddly and a bit boring) but I think I am getting somewhere.

Still fiddling about

I'm still not quite there with this, but think I'm making progress, albeit one tiny step at a time.  I have been adding strips of the beige-y fabric from the tulip blocks into some of my string blocks.

I hadn't done many when I took the picture below, but to my eye they help pull the two sets of blocks together so they look more cohesive.  

The more I add, the better they do the job.

What they can't do, though, is address the fact that some of these tulips are such a similar tone to their backing that they become largely invisible.  They look lovely on the table or in my hand, but from a distance they are just little squares of pale mush.  The red one at the bottom works much better so I'm making more stronger, darker, brighter variations.  Hopefully I can slide the pale ones in amongst them too, but I definitely need to use them sparingly. 

This is not my planned layout because I don't have one of those yet.  It is just the most useful way I found to photograph this for the moment.

Propelled by sheer obstinacy

 Yup, that's what has kept me moving with these tulips this week.  Here's how it went:

1.  Decide to piece your tulips.  Do a little sketch.  Decide the piecing will be too fiddly and that you need to make these blocks a bit bigger.  

2. Use a dodgy string block to get a feel for what the pieced flower might look like.  

3. Accidentally drop the flower on top of another block.  Like how it looks, with the tulip in the corner, so make a couple like that.

4.  Check these flowers with your string blocks.  Spot the not-so-deliberate error.  Two sides might work, the other two will merge into your strings in an unpleasant mush.  Also, larger gingham makes everything way too busy.

5. Not giving up.  Pull apart blocks, go back to your drawer full of shirts and look for a new background.  Find a lovely taupe shirt, recently acquired (but sadly way too big to wear).  Yes, that looks good.  Remake blocks.

6.  Check these flowers with your string blocks.  Hmm.  Like the strings, like the flowers but they look like they belong in different quilts.

7.  Maybe this would help?

8. Remake blocks adding little extra strips which, as it happens, add a slight leafy effect.  Better.

9. Check these flowers with your string blocks.  They look too big and a bit top heavy.  Decide they need to be smaller.  Try not to think about step one.

10.  Cut them down.

I'm not there yet, but feel like I get closer with each iteration.  To be fair, I only made a couple of the initial test blocks, so there are not horrific amounts of re-sewing going on.  in fact, the thinking probably takes more time than the actual stitching. 

A side note: this kitchen floor is doing nothing to help.  It is scheduled for replacement and you can be sure that I am hoping for something that does as good a job in quilting terms as the dark grey tiles at the last house.  

More strings

 More strings. 

Since I'm not entirely decided where I'm going with this project yet (more musing on this here, on the AHIQ blog) I have decided I will just keep making these until I get bored and then tackle the tulips.  Of course this won't take long, given my low boredom threshold but I reckon I've got at least another couple of  string-making sessions in me before I need a change.  

I love a tulip

Hmm.  I have been itching to start  Ann's AHIQ quiltalong.  As regular readers of this blog may remember there are few things I love as much as a good tulip, so a tulip-y quilt felt right up my street. It is especially welcome since I have moved house since last spring.  I have already put some tulips into the new garden, but nowhere near enough.    

However, this has already presented me with a few challenges.  Not a bad thing, but maybe this wont' be quite the simple sew I thought.  First up, I wanted to use scraps, since the only properly scrap-based quilts I have made were both lego quilts (and much as I admire Julie's many variations on this theme, I'm not inclined to go there again).  Turns out my current way of quilting doesn't generate masses of scrap.  This is my entire collection

and there are quite a few bits in that box that are big enough for me to consider including them in a top, so they are not really scraps for this purpose.

Second up, I can't quite relinquish all control, so wanted some sort of limited palette to play around with.  Hmm again.

I almost put the scrap box away and started again.  In fact I pulled a lovely assortment of blue and purple shirts that would make an excellent starting point for a quilt.  Maybe they still will, but in the end I stuck with the scraps.

This is where I got to at the end of the first session. You can see that I have already had to start pushing at the edges of my limited colour range but they seem to hang together alright.  

Now for a few days of nice, straightforward sewing before I have to start mithering away again.