Done and dusted: Sugar and Spice

All this time quilting is paying off, as I have another finish.  This is a quilt that was pieced in 2019, so I am definitely catching up with myself, albeit slowly.  

I had a song-and-dance trying to get photos.  No prop for the clothesline, as previously mentioned, and no indoor options, so in the end I got creative with a length of downpipe and some clothes pegs.  (The builders are coming in October and once they're done my priority will be an indoor wall set up for quilt photos.  Something not weather-dependent.)  

Once I had things set up I took quite a few photos, trying to get the colours right.  I find these light pale shades don't always photograph so well.  I think some of these are okay though.

I like this picture of the back too, because the quilting shows up nicely.

I too-ed and fro-ed with this while I was piecing it: it pleased me very much that all the shirts came from one rack, in one shop.  When I saw them all neatly lined up, with their sugared almond colours, it felt as if they were calling me to take them home and turn them into something.  On the other hand, once I had started I was nearly overwhelmed by that very same sweetness and, briefly, came almost to dislike it.  Once I had figured out what I needed to add in to balance the sweetness, though, I came to love it.  I love that it has not one, not two but three different bird fabrics in there, that the magpies, which I had held on to for ages, found a home and that they let me to the little sparks of emerald green.  I love that in the end nothing about this felt predictable to me, but everything felt right.  

The details  

Started on 15th May 2019, the piecing was done by the 18th July.  I started quilting round about June this year, and finished on 12th September.

Made from that lovely shirt pull (yellow, deep coral, blue, green, pink and the print with little parrots on), plus a small selection of organic prints from stash, including the Charley Harper magpies. The batting is organic cotton, which is pretty much my favourite right now and the quilting was done with no. 8 perle cottons, again from stash.

Sugar and Spice: done for now

I'm not sure I like the name 'Sugar and Spice', since I'm not especially keen on the nursery rhyme it brings to mind, but it seems to have stuck,  Maybe I'll come up with something better in the fullness of time.  For now, though, I'm done with this one.

Funnily, having been pretty downcast about this when I started piecing, I really like it a lot now. Mr Sew Slowly said, as he often does "they're not your usual colours".  I am coming to recognise that I seldom start with my favourite colours but that what sparks my interest and brings me (eventually) the most satisfaction is starting somewhere that feels a bit uncomfortable and getting to that point where I feel like I've cracked it.  I learn more this way too.

Having said which, I do love a nice bird fabric and this has ended up with more than its share.  This wasn't deliberate - I mostly pick things for variety in colour and pattern but nonetheless I have managed to squeeze feathers, magpies, parrots and elegant little waders into one quilt.

This goes into the quilting pile (note to self to get on with quilting - haven't done any for a couple of weeks and that's no way to make progress) and I shall start to contemplate making something flowery.  

Not far to go

Today the good news is that I found my last strip of brown fabric.  It's not huge, (those tiles are 13" square, to give you an idea) but then I don't need much.  I could probably have coped without it, by using more of the black fabric, but it's good to have my options open.

I made this chunk, which I think is the bottom right-hand corner. 

I'm not tidying up the edges until I'm sure of what I'm doing...which might be something like this.

I need to get the position of the top cross just right.  If it's too low or too close to the central one it seems to make the whole thing feel a bit squat, though I am finding that the foreshortening that comes with taking photos on the floor makes it hard to demonstrate that with a picture.  Anyway, I know where I think it belongs so it's just a question of working backwards from that point to fill in the gaps.

Nearly there, I think.

Today I took photos

Well, I have managed to keep sewing but if I want to keep up with the blogging I will have to do a better job of taking photos. I sat down on Saturday, all ready to post what I had done on Friday only to discover the pictures I was sure I had taken did not exist.  Bother! 

I have done better today, when I got this chunk sorted out.

 This is what it looks like as part of the bigger picture, so to speak.  

I am running very, very low of most fabrics now, but have a little pile of crosses done so I'm pretty sure I can get to the finish line. I will probably have to resort to lots of tiny crosses to fill in my gaps, rather than a few bigger ones, so it will be more work, but I don't mind that too much.  I've given up looking for the extra brown bit.

One a completely different note, I thought I'd share this picture of a Banded Demoiselle.  We have loads of these damselflies in the garden and never tire of admiring them, but they seldom stay still.  This poor chap had died, but I was grateful to be able to get up so close. 

Checking in, catching up

Normal life has resumed and I am going to try hard not to take another three weeks to get back to blogging and blog reading.  That seems to have been  my pattern in the last year, pause...still pausing...slow, slow, slow return to normal.  This time I am back at the sewing, so I am now knuckling down to the blog-related end of things.

Here are a couple of quick update photos.  The first is how things looked when I first got my bits out of the box and laid them out

 and this is a smaller area, but all these bits are now sewn together.

I'm still doing a lot of shuffling around, mostly figuring out where I want the bigger crosses to sit in relation to each other.  Once I have the feel for that I am using smaller ones from my pile of ready-mades to fill in the gaps.  

It definitely feels like I am in the swing of it now and I am much happier.  In fact I am coming to like this slightly odd mix of colours a lot.  My only minor frustration is that I know I have one more strip of the tan/brown fabric somewhere: I came across it, realised it would be needed, put it somewhere safe, but not, unfortunately, somewhere obvious.  So I am spending a fair amount of time in unproductive searching. In the meantime I have switched to other fabrics, since every last inch of the original fabric has gone.  

In quieter moments I am also considering the next AHIQ challenge, which is up and running, for anyone who wants to join in.

Tiny crosses fill my days

I am not expecting to piece much next week, so am pushing hard to make progress while things seem to be working.  I am reminded that there is always a big gap between that moment when I think I know what I am doing and how I will get to an end and actually reaching that end.  In this case, the space in between those two points seems to be filled with tiny little crosses.  

This big chunk was sewn together today. I added a bit above the smaller black cross, to drop that section down, and filled in a lot of spaces with my little crosses.  I'm pretty happy with how this is coming now.

Here, just for my own satisfaction, is a close-up of a section, just to give a better look at some of the fabrics that are bouncing the light back in most of the pictures.

I am keeping an eye on the green and brown and black as I go, since they seem to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but mostly it's just me, my machine and cross after cross.  Isn't it funny how I think I have a short attention span (I do) but then I'll sit and do something utterly, tediously repetitive for literally hours if the end result seems to justify it.  There is, as they say, nowt so queer as folk.

Keeping track

There's not much to be said about this right now, but I'm posting just to keep track of progress.

Again, this is not the final layout but I am playing around now with how the pieces fit together and won't be making more of the bigger bits unless I have a specific space for one. Instead I'm thinking about how to use the small, smaller, smallest blocks to hold everything together.  There's a bit of the bright green sneaking in, and little squares of black and tan.  

Using all these light fabrics is making this piece hard to photograph - lots of the detail in the prints just isn't in this picture at all and the blue and green shirts are virtually indistinguishable. I think it's because it's so very dark I've ended up using the flash and the light is just bouncing straight off it.   I'm hoping that when I finish and hang it on the line the light will work better. If it ever stops raining I may try some line photos anyway, but right now there's no prospect of that, just water, water, everywhere.

More like it

I have made better progress in the last couple of days and the addition of those extra prints is definitely helping to take this (and me) to a better place.

Once I get a fair number of bits I like to lay them out every time I am working.  They are different each time for a while, but I know that eventually I will look at some particular combination, two blocks sitting next to each other and think, 'yes, you'll do' and those will become one bigger piece.  It is also helping me to think about what I need to do next.  I can't just go on making bits without any clear idea of whether I need them.  Well, I could, but it would be a bit of a waste and just leave me searching around for an alternative to replace the fabrics I had started with.  

Looking at this (and knowing that I have another of the big black crosses almost finished) I am thinking that I need some more of the medium-sized and smaller blocks and that at the moment there are not enough bits of the tan fabric.  I will  make extra black/tan/green crosses and also see how many squares I can cut out of  my remaining magpie fabric.  Once I've got  these extras I can start looking at the bigger picture and thinking how the different colours are moving around the top.

There's a long way to go, but things are starting to click.  I might even be starting to like those ice cream tones again.

Going backwards to go forwards

I feel like I am finally getting somewhere, though I am mostly unpicking what I have already done and reworking it.  Both the bigger pieces here have had changes and I like them better for it.

These bits are now all fine by me.

I have quite a pile of spare parts, all sweet, now waiting for pairs that will keep me going in this direction.  I plan to make more of the smallest size blocks, and still have fabrics that need to be added, but for the first time I am pretty sure I will be carrying on with this.

In conversation with commenters on the previous post I have realised a couple of things.  The first is that although I often see quilts made with solid fabrics that I very much admire, in my own quilting I am less comfortable with lack of pattern.  It seems to add an extra layer, or set of options, that pleases my eye, to add some depth and movement.  I wonder why this is.  

The second is that it is all about combinations.  If you can find the right partner(s), any colour can be made to work.  My usual method is to pull out literally everything and just keep auditioning until I find something that I like, then to build on that (looking for similar colours/tones but with variety of scale, pattern etc).  It would probably give some people a headache to work this way but it usually gets me where I need to go and definitely comes up with better solutions than deciding I know up front what will work. 

Possibly, maybe...

Possibly, just possibly, this is going somewhere okay.

I spent a week away from the ice cream colours thinking, basically, that this was a big fat no.  Too sweet, too mushy, too much like hard work.  Blah.  But somewhere along the line I decided to see if I could track down a green I liked and when I found one (in a shop, not a box, I have to admit) I found some other things I thought might work too.  Since I went organic I haven't really done this, but these are all organic so I placed an order.  My thinking was that the black and white prints needed a bit more help; I wanted just a smidge of that green that's in the magpie print but also a few bits that had more pattern to them.  All the shirts have stripes or a check, but they're all so subtle they might as well not be there really.  

Here's what I got.

I pulled apart one of the chunks I'd made already, ripped out a couple of the pastel shirts and added in a bit more variety.  Like this.

It's not that big a difference (see below left for an untweaked block) but I like it a lot better.  It is genuinely a coincidence that I am adding in an extra bird fabric - bought because the colours were right and it was on sale.  Now I think I just need to get more iterations with these new additions, so that I can start to develop a bit of rhythm.

That's the theory, anyway.