Progress and a sigh of relief

I have been all around the houses with this quilt, but I have finally moved it on a bit.

Since I last posted about it I have contemplated adding smaller blocks, adding a darker block, adding sashing using my darkest red shirt.

I also spend a lot of time pondering why I felt the need to do anything.  After all this is a perfectly satisfying block and a whole bunch of them just sewn together in a perfectly straightforward way look rather lovely.  Yet I couldn't quite bring myself to do it.  I needed to tinker.  I needed to make it my own in some way. 

I rather liked the smaller block (it's 6.5") but only till I thought about how many I might need to make.  The grey didn't add anything, so the red shirt seemed like my best option.  Just to be sure, I went back through my boxes and found this, mucky greeny-brown, which also seemed to be making a case for inclusion.

 In the end I have ended up with this.

I would concede that this is only the tiniest tweak and am not even claiming that it looks better than it would have done without my butting in, but somehow I feel much better and there is a lesson for me in that.

I might add a border or I might stop here. Tomorrow I'm hoping to sew the final seam on it (currently it's two big chunks) and then I'll see.  Right now I'm mostly just feeling relieved!

Now I'm bored

One minute you are happily chugging along, making strip sets, chopping them up, marvelling at the new patterns they make when reassembled, next minute...I got my blocks out this morning, laid them out, as is my habit and suddenly thought, 'no, I'm over this now'.  Short attention span, see?

However, I have this group of bits, which still pleases me and I am thinking that one more row would get me within spitting distance of a reasonable size (floor tiles are 13" square, so I'm somewhere between 60" and 65" across at this point). So I will keep going, at least until I have made four more blocks.

This isn't any sort of deliberate layout and I will sew them back into squares before I worry about that (just too much of a fiddle at the moment).  I am torn between wanting to impose some sort of order and exactly the opposite.  The compromise will be to have a think about the fabric combinations that go into the last four blocks.  After that, I'm not sure.  Maybe I will retrieve my enthusiasm and end up making another 18 blocks, but I wouldn't hold your breaths!

The questions you ask yourself

I have been surprised by enticing I have found these blocks.  I think it's the sense of unpredictability; try as I might I can't look at a strip set and imagine how it will look when it's cut up and reassembled, so each time I do it it's almost like magic.  

I have been aware, somewhere at the back of my mind, that they are very tidy blocks (for me) and that usually I would look at all these straight lines and feel slightly uneasy, want to tweak things or mess around.  That I have kept going without fiddling is definitely due to that sense of wonder I get from making these (maybe I'm easily pleased, but it's a fine feeling).

I am also influenced by the fact that I will be selling my house shortly and expect not to have a good sewing space for a while.  Not sewing at all feels like a bad option, so I am thinking that working in a more block-based way may be a temporary answer.  This piece might be seen, then, as an experiment in that direction.  

However, Soma commented, quite fairly, on this uncharacteristic neatness and now she has me wondering.  Here are my questions: am I happy to keep these going, with just little changes in the individual blocks to keep me happy; should I try the same block but deliberately be less neat; might I leave these as they are but add something in? Pros and cons and no answers here at the moment.

Short attention span

So...I liked the chunky strip sets I was making last time, but they didn't keep me interested for very long and I found I was doing that thing of unintentionally cutting pretty straight lines, which was giving me very orderly-looking chunks at that.  Thoughts of triangles and circles were whirling about my head so I decided 'nothing ventured, nothing gained' and started chopping.

I made some triangles, then put them back together into these.

For some reason I find it very entertaining to make all those crosses and concentric squares in this way, so I kept going.

When I get bored of doing this, I'll figure out what next, but for now I'm having fun.

When life gives you plaids...

Sometimes life just doesn't play nice.  Off I went to the charity shops, looking for dark, dark reds and some pattern that wasn't plaid. What did I find?  Nothing really dark, no patterns, but a whole pile of lovely plaids and stripes.

I have taken this as a sign and am going to work with what I have.

I think that if the plaids and stripes dominate my reds, they will balance all the plain and plain-ish fabrics I have in my pile of other colours.  I've started by making some sets of strips - wider than I would normally use but I'm trying to apply some of the lessons from Playing with Scale and not always start with the skinniest options.  Here's an example.

I'm planning to make a pile along these lines and then figure out what next.  I might use them as a version of Chinese Coins, might cut squares from them, or triangles or...who knows?  At least I am handling my fabrics and getting a feel for the colours and how they work together.

Still pulling and pondering

I am behind.  Behind on my blogging and behind on my blog reading.  Not so much behind on my sewing, which I guess is the most important thing, but I will be happier once I catch up properly.  

Mostly I am quilting, trying to get Playing with Scale finished, but I am also, still, playing around with options for Red is a Neutral.  

It's a tricky thing to get your head round, on some levels.  I find myself a bit overwhelmed by all the red, though I have been happy enough to work with it in the past.  However, I came across an explanation of why red works as a neutral that is helping me.  The gist of it is that a neutral is any colour that shows off the colours it is paired with to their best advantage; conversely, any colour can shine when paired with red.  

If I take this idea to its logical conclusion then it shouldn't matter what else I choose to add in to my pile of shirts.  I've started by pulling out some of the colours I can see in the plaids - blues and greeny blues but also yellows and a bit of brown.

 I like these, but when I look at them with the reds...

I feel like I'm not quite there.  Ideally I would like something much darker - navy, charcoal, black - and one or two more prints.  The fact that they are not there reflects my dwindling stash: I have hardly bought any fabric for nearly 3 years and this may be the point where I need to address that.

In the meantime, I'll do another pass at the charity shops and see if that yields anything encouraging.