Phew

At long last I have got this top to a place I am happy with.  I'm not entirely sure why I've struggled so much, to be honest.  A lot of disruptions haven't helped, nor has working with what was probably slightly too little fabric, but I like the shapes and the colours a lot and have never had one of those moments where I just fell out of love with the whole thing.  Nonetheless, this is only the second completed top of the year and we are already in July.  

Here's the photo of quilt on shed

and here is a close up of quilt with teasel.

It is, theoretically a weed, but this is the wilder part of the garden and the goldfinches love them, so I seldom pull them up, even when they are photobombing my quilt pictures.  Also, look what a lovely colour match it is for this particular quilt!

It has to be said that I really, really like this quilt, so maybe all the time it took to get here doesn't really matter at all in the end.

Done and dusted: my orange summer

My piecing may be slow, slow, slow, but at least I am keeping the quilting ticking along and as a result have a finished quilt. More to the point, I have a finished quilt that feels cheery and summery and perfect for the current weather. Here it is, nicely attached to the front of my little shed.  

I don't think it's as satisfactory a location for photos as the washing line, but I used to prop that up with a length of downpipe, which has now been used, strangely enough, for its proper purpose.  Until we devise an alternative prop, the shed is the best option.  

Having always worked through my quilting pile chronologically, last in, first out, I have changed my approach this year.  I am now working on two hoops, instead of one.  The first will always be something that's been waiting ages, but the other can be anything I fancy.  This particular quilt was only pieced last year, but I am still in an orange kind of place, so it pushed its way to the front of the queue.  It has made me happy, working on these colours and fabrics, so it was definitely a good choice.

You can see that I was really feeling the orange when I pulled fabrics for the back.

Mostly my backs are made using fabrics from the oldest part of my stash - so before I started only buying organic yardage and shirts.  I have started to contemplate what I will do once I run out of this stuff.  I am not keen on piecing all my backs from shirts and things like vintage sheets sound like a good idea, until you try to track them down - they are hard to find here and also expensive.  

I am really pleased with how this quilt turned out - I love the denim/orange combination and, strangely, haven't found the denim hard to quilt.  It has slightly more weight to it than an all-cotton quilt, but when the weather turns cold, I rather like something a bit heavier.  

So, down to the nitty-gritty. 

This was started on September 14th 2021 and piecing was completed October 14th.  I am surprised to see that this only took a month from start to finish. I think I started quilting it during the first week in January, and have been working in fits and starts until last week.  It was finished on June 29th 2022. 

I started with shirts and denim, and added in bits from stash.  You might recognise the black floral fabric from here.  Handquilted using perle no. 8.  I didn't buy anything special but just pulled the best options I had already.  I have been doing that for a while now, but think I will have to restock soon. The binding is a very old Oakshott stripe that has been in my boxes for at least seven or eight years now.  

My favourite parts of this quilt are the two strips of flying geese, and, specifically, the places where the geese change direction.  I will be making those again at some point.  

Locked out

Apologies for blog silence and my failure to respond to (and make) comments - I've had no computer for a little bit. It just switched off one evening and never switched back on.  Now I have one again, but sadly not masses of progress to share.  Current progress looks like this.

I can't claim there's a particular reason for my slow pace, but the weather has been good and the garden has called my name.  It will rain soon, so I am, almost literally, making hay while the sun shines.

A bit of whingeing, a bit of sewing

Whingeing first, plus an apology.  I turned comment moderation on, because I was sick of having idiotic spam comments under my posts.  Somehow that messed with the bit of blogger that sends things to my inbox.  So I read your comment, I ticked that it was a bona fide, not at all bot-sent, quilt-related comment, and boom, it was on the blog but nowhere else.  You might think that getting on the blog is the most important bit, and you would have a point, but I rather fear that there will be a few commenters who haven't had responses from me because it took me a while to realise the inbox version wasn't turning up.  If this has happened to you, I apologise.  Anyway, for now I have removed comment moderation.  My brain is currently quite scattered enough -I don't want to go losing comments left, right and centre!

Anyway...on to the quilting.  Perhaps this is also reflective of my distracted state of mind.  That's to say progress is slow.  Here are just a couple of versions that have been laid out in the last few days.

I have played around with adding a variety of different bits and pieces.  The denim strips with skinny inserts will stay, I think.  The jury is out on those very dark bits at the bottom of the photo above.  

I tried adding bigger bits of that pretty, used-to-be-a-dress print,but they have gone already.  They just made it all a bit too busy for my liking.  

I am still looking at this from all sides and still looking for the best way to put in the extra green.  I only have the two pieces you can see above and enough for maybe one more wide-ish strip which forces me to think carefully. With the benefit of hindsight I wish that the two bits already in the quilt hadn't ended up looking almost the same length.  Maybe I will unpick.  Then again, maybe not!

Which way is up?

I am still working on this from all sides, but realise that the photos are taken from a single point.  This is just because of where the table and chairs are located; I tend to just swivel the chair I am sitting in and climb onto it to do the pictures, where as when I am working I roam all over the place. 

Here are some progress shots.  Mostly these are just bits lying on the floor.  Every so often I go so far as to sew something to something else, but there's still a lot of shuffling. Nevertheless, in the interests of full disclosure, this is how it's been going...

What I want to do next is find a place for another strip of green and dig out some scraps of the dark green I'm using for the geese- I'm pretty sure there are more bits of it somewhere.

Turning things around

Slow progress here. Firstly, I have had covid.  Nothing horrendous, but nobody else in the family wanted it, so I was coralled in the spare room until I could produce a negative test.  I did some hand quilting but that was my lot.  

Once they let me out again,  I pulled out some shirts I thought were worth trying with my existing fabrics, but nothing has really excited me. You can see below a few of the things I tried - mostly variations on blue or green, because that's what I have.  I have also tried random other things - burnt orange, a gold bit, a red and blue plaid.  Nope, nope and nope again.  

I have also considered adding blocks with a variety of different shapes - circles, squares, string blocks but again nothing I feel so sure about I want to waste time, or, more to the point, fabric on trying them out.  

The thing that has worked best so far, in terms of at least letting me take a small step forward, is literally turning things around.  Like so...

There may be disadvantages to working on the floor (weird perspective in photos, for instance) but it makes it really easy to look at a piece from a different angle.  All it took was one big step, the bottom became the left hand side and somehow I could see a way forward. I am thinking I might keep taking sideways steps, so that I end up with a piece constructed from all 4 sides, without an official top or bottom.  I did it once before, with this quilt and it worked well.  

Of course from a practical point of view, I still need to augment the fabric pile but that's a problem for another day.

 

Am I missing something?

 Hmmm.  I have some bits made that I like.  In fact, I have quite a few.  I have been happily shuffling them about on the floor and have, I think, a vague sense of where I want to go.  

I have also done some unpicking and made some bits that just didn't work.  See that green strip above?  That's gone now.  I'm still using the green, but not in the centre of a block that wants a blue strip.  You can get the gist of what I am doing, I'm sure.

But here's the thing, the sticking point of the moment.  I kind of feel I haven't got enough.  Maybe I need another fabric or two, since I have abandoned a couple that were in my original pull.  Maybe I need another shape in the mix.  I can't quite put my finger on it.  What I know is that I shuffle and shuffle, but always get to a point where I haven't quite got what I want next.

I have pulled out a couple of shirts that might go into the mix and am doodling away, trying to think about shapes that I could try out too. Fingers crossed!