Missing the right bits

Slow progress.

I have added to the right hand side - and am not trying to figure out what happens above and below this piece.  

Quite a lot of the bits in this picture had not yet been sewn together, so the wider blue and white strips will end up rather narrower than they look.  The bit I'm struggling with right now is the top right-hand corner.  I would like the blue to extend around it, but can't find quite the right combination of bits.  Up until now I have just been using what I already had made, but I think the next step will be to make something specifically for the space.  

A whole lot of shuffling going on.

I still like the dark blue, which is a relief.  Right now I'm doing quite a lot of laying things out on the floor, like this...

to try and figure out where I want to use the dark stripes and where I want to stick with the pale ones.  Occasionally when I like something I'm pinning bits together, so that I don't forget next time I get them out and every so often I am biting the bullet and sewing.  

I'm still trying to avoid letting everything get too 'block-y' and this sort of placement creates little gaps to fill, which I hope will help with that.  Partial seams help too (and seem to have become a habit now).

Third time lucky

Well this has been interesting.

Having said I needed something extra, I started playing around with some different shapes.  I tried triangles

then I toyed with the idea of something circle-y, based on these vintage samples of furnishing fabric

but realistically I wasn't going to have enough fabric for this approach.

I'm not sure what led me back to my boxes, but I went furtling about in the one containing shirts and came up with this,

which led to this.

I like it, so I'm going to do a bit more and see how it goes. I'm guessing it will come down to whether I can balance the blue and the white stripy bits satisfactorily.

Fits and starts

It appears this is one of those projects that involves a fair bit of puzzling things out, though I hope my little strips are going to provide at least part of the answer. 

My issue currently is that although I like my individual pieces and the stripy fabric that is joining them together, I don't want it everywhere, otherwise each block is framed with the stripes and the whole thing ends up looking too- well, block-y.  Yes, I know that's not a word, but hopefully it conveys my problem.  If this is just a collection of big rectangles outlined with stripes then it becomes static, so I need to find ways to keep some movement.  I'm hoping the newest pieces will help with that, firstly just because they are a different element but also, on a more practical level, they are a way to stop any individual line of the stripy fabric extending too far, of disrupting the grid. 

This picture is quite a good example, even with the extra strip sets, of how easily this could feel static and lumpen. 

I think I need to add something more.

Quick update

Not much to say about this, but here's a bit of progress.  

My pile of "blocks" is growing

and I have started making these little strips too.

I am hoping these will let me sneak in some little bits of the purple and green fabrics as well as using up my smaller scraps.

A practical aside: I don't know which part of the gmail/blogger interface is to blame but comments are being emailed to me multiple times at the moment.  This means I have become hopelessly confused about which one I have replied to.  I am trying methodically to work my way through it, but will almost undoubtedly slip up somewhere, so apologies in advance to anyone I accidentally ignore.

Chinese Coins: finally finished

Phew!  I though I would still be working on this at Christmas but Chinese Coins is done.

I usually choose the binding when the quilt is finished. This fabric, though,  was in the initial pull and I have kept it floating about in my eye-line rather than tucking it back into a box because I have always been sure I wanted to use it.

There have been (numerous) times while I was working on this that I wondered what I was doing.  This little quilt seemed dull and the freehand cross-hatching seemed like a good idea gone bad and was taking longer than even I could enjoy.   I wondered if I should have ruled all the quilting lines, worried that the variations in the grid would look sloppy, at one point nearly put the whole thing back in the cupboard (something I never do: I start, so I finish).  

But guess what.  Quilted, bound, completed - I just love this quilt.  I love the gentle colours and the shirt fabrics, I love the shapes and the quilting - just love it all.  Mostly I see things I would change at this point, but for whatever reason this one seems just fine exactly as it is.  Just goes to show you can't second-guess these things.

The details

Started 3rd February 2017 as part of the first AHIQ challenge, set by Ann.

Finished piecing 31st March 2017.

Started quilting 17th June 2018.

Completed 27th September 2018.
Finished size 69" x 71".

Made from a big pile of shirts and fabrics from stash.  

Bound with a stripe bought in the Oakshott warehouse sale about 8 years ago.  

Wadding is Sew Simple Supersoft Eco Blend (70/30, all recycled).  

Quilted, using ordinary quilting thread, with a mostly free-hand crosshatch pattern.  

Linking up today with Kathy for Slow Sunday Stitching.

Remember it's a quilt...

Well I've been all around the houses with this.   None of the fabrics I showed in my last post felt absolutely, definitely, no doubt about it right.  So I went back to my boxes and tried almost everything.  I tried solids, big pattern, small pattern.  I tried variations on blue, yellow and brown again.  Then I tried green, then grey, then pink, purple, red.  I tried pretty much everything.  

This was the one I liked the best.

But when I spread the fabric out and tried it over a bigger area, I liked it less.  Humph.

All the fabric went back in the boxes and I tried to figure out why nothing was working.  In short, I wanted something that would fit effortlessly in with the blocks I had, but I could find it; all my blocks seemed to float above the fabrics I was finding.  I wondered if the answer was to use more than one choice. (As a side note, some of these fabrics may still sneak into the quilt somewhere,just not here.)

Yesterday the boxes came out again.  I considered a dark grey, an old Carolyn Friedlander with gold triangles.  Both had their merits but neither ticked all my boxes.

Then I had a moment of insight (yes, it happens from time to time).  When I started this project my note to self read 'not literal, just a design prompt: lines, shapes, repeats, spaces'. Yet here I was, thinking literally: these spaces needed to be a different fabric because they were 'roads' not 'alleyways' or 'walls'.  But this is a quilt not a map.  So I tried this.

Much better.  Onwards and upwards!