Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Beavering away

Oops. It is a week since I posted.  I have been beavering away but don't seem to have made all that much progress. I am working on a small quilt at the moment.  It is for the Living Colour challenge. I have made a couple of quilt tops so far.  Neither is quite what I wanted but I am going to persevere with the current one.  So far I have spent HOURS pulling it apart!!!!!
I thank my tapestry practice for making me so much more patient. There is a lot of unpicking involved in tapestry and I was told it is just par for the course - one teacher even said she will unpick about a third of her work. So I am feeling much more relaxed about using the seam ripper with my quilt.
It also helps that I started early and have time to play around with it.

Yesterday was a crisis day - I had put all the sashing on and then discovered that I had made it TOO LONG - what angst ( and some deleted expletives).  I thought that I would put it aside and move on to my new idea, with the intention of going back to it later.  But then I realised that I would not want to start a day with unpicking as the beginning activity. I made myself unpick all the bits, which included taking out some of the very carefully chosen colours and rearranging the quilt top - very fiddly.  But I soldiered on and, even though it took about 9 hours, got it back to where I started the day.
Today I finished putting it together. I will not post a picture in case I decide it is ok for entering the challenge.  We have been asked not to post images. But I will put in a little bit.  I tried really hard to get the 1" squares lined up (I use the old imperial measurements for quilting, most of the equipment is from the USA) - I even starched them all - but they just wouldn't co-operate.  I'll have to decide what sort of quilting will hide the imperfections.  That is tomorrow's effort,

It is a colour wash quilt, something I have not really done much of before.  I am not sure it will be good enough to enter but I just can't stop now - I have to finish it.  I actually rather like it but it is definitely for viewing from afar, especially if you have blurry eyes like I do.  No close-up viewing allowed.

I do have another idea for the challenge, just hope I have time to develop it and make the quilt.

2 comments:

theregatha said...

LOVE the colours, cant wait to see the whole piece. Is the "purple" part of border. Never thought of putting a splash of turquoise in my pink, but it does work well. Happy quilting!

Mary said...

Thanks theregatha, the strip of colour, often called sashing, is part of the design. It is going to be a colour optical illusion thing, I hope. I am thinking that the not square shapes are not very satisfactory and may not even enter it, so then I will post a full picture, once I have quilted it and decided. I have also realised that the quilting is going to change the proportions, it always pulls in the work, so it may not be the right size anyway. Ho hum, need to get on with it so I can finally make the decision. I am determined to finish it even it if doesn't get entered in the challenge. I don't need yet another UFO.