penny patch evolution

 the obsession with penny patch continues. really, such a simple quilt, but i've turned it into an epic quilt journey. all my blocks are laid out now. i've been much happier with it since the changes i made to my original fabric pull.

terri ann said to me in a comment, "it's funny how obsessed we can become with creating perfect balance on even a scrappy style quilt huh?" too true. this one keeps dragging me over and sucking me in. having it on the design wall where i see it all the time is a completely different experience. it's actually rather silly how much enjoyment i get out of messing with these blocks, rearranging the squares.

however, this weekend there was still something bothering me. a few somethings.

1. i have never been happy with my choice of the pink as the "pop color". it just didn't pop. but it was the only other color besides the oranges and blues from the pull, so i was using it.

2. i wanted some more color fabrics that were less color dense, included more low-volume in them, as a way to add more low-volume to the over all look.

3. i didn't have enough different blue prints, especially once i decided to remove the green prints as my filler blues.

4. that really bright tangerine was sorta buggin' me, too.

see, i like all these fabrics. but the original pull only incorporated 2 different lines and one of the prints, that sprig, was in the quilt in 6 different colors. i was craving more variety. but i did not want to spend any more money on more fabric. a lady with a bookcase full of fabric, and several boxes to boot, should surely be able to make-do from her stash.

 so i inserted a butterfly print from sandi henderson's meadowsweet collection. every quilt needs a bit of meadowsweet, right? it stayed on the board all week and i thought i liked it. but then i stopped liking the linear nature of the butterflies. they were fluttering in my face too much. it just didn't flow with the feel of the quilt.

by the way, because of the size of my design wall, the quilt is laid out on its side, hence the odd orientation of the blocks in the photos. just in case you noticed and were wondering.

well, i visited my stash again and again. orange is sort of a new color for me and apparently i don't have much low volume, either. darn it!

by saturday, i just couldn't stand it any more. i was going to have to either be unsatisfied with the quilt i had already invested so much time into or GO SHOP. shopping definitely won out.

i brought home a 1/4 yard of everything in the store that i thought might even come close to working. i looked for a different pop color that i could somehow still tie into what i already had and prints in my current color that included a lot of neutral/low volume as well. to really complicate matters, this quilt has a very specific 60's/70's feel to it that i'm trying to maintain.

strike two

strike three

i replaced the butterfly print with a sweet orange floral from happy go lucky by bonnie and camille for moda. it was much better . . . and then it wasn't.

honestly, the more i started pulling out prints and trying to add in the new ones, the more i felt like i was just creating fabric vomit. was i making a huge mistake? had i wasted enough time and effort already? (the fabric is not wasted - it'll get used somewhere, sometime.) self-doubt was trampling me. but as i continued to plow through, switching and culling, it started to feel right.

a closer look at the notebook low-volume print. see the light blue lines that make this look like aged notebook paper? love it.

i could have just sewn everything together the way it was and decided not to care. sometimes you have to cut your losses and make do. i really believe that. but i also believe in not settling. deciding when to do which is hard. however, this quilt has been a learning experiment for me all along, so i made the choice to keep learning. i kept thinking about a recent post where rachel hauser said "don't settle." it seemed right.



and it's paying off. i'm so much happier with the results now even though i suspect that it really doesn't look all that different to anyone else.

some new low-volumes added and a few more blues, including darker ones

i was completely surprised by what ended up working for me. the dark horse, long shot choices were the ones i liked best. goodness, i even pulled that happy go lucky floral that replaced the butterfly that replaced the tangerine sprig, and put the tangerine sprig back in in a few select places.

finally, a home run - several of the new add-ins are seen here

but it's okay. it's all okay. i'm feeling my way through what i like and what works for me. it's stretching and growing going on over here. it's not even so much about the final quilt any more as it is about what i'm experiencing. that's important to me this time around. it won't always be my priority with a quilt, but this time it is.

***surprise, surprise - since i wrote and scheduled this post, laura has said this even better than i have over at little and lots. not only is she a great quilter, she's a writer, too; always speaking to the heart and getting inside the head of quilting. how does she do it? "So, to me, these quilts have ended up being about me as a creator. About pushing aside those evil voices that nag at you when you’re working–voices that sometimes make you put down your work in discouragement." ditto what she said.

all in place now - sewing together of blocks has commenced

i haven't recreated vintage tangerine in exactness here. not by a long shot. i have a more aged tone going on and my colors are stronger, there is less lightness to it. but i do have something i like a whole lot. the fact that this looks very fall-ish is an added bonus since I was just thinking some of the quilts in my family room look so very summer they should probably be put away for a few months.

the last question is what to do with all the cut rejects, because surely i have nearly enough for another quilt by now. i'm probably going to throw them together into a second (third?) penny patch called "leftover pennies" and give it away to someone special i have in mind. i like that idea. i think God can take the messes we make in our lives and make something beautiful or useful out of them. why can't i do that with quilt leftovers, hmm? it won't even make a bit of difference to me how that 2nd one turns out because i already know it's going to be a big, beautiful scrappy pile of culled fabrics. and that's good, too.

the stack for penny patch 1.2

linking in:

my paris nightmare

the mess on my dining table, waiting to be sorted

 like all nightmares, it started out as a very simple idea that should have come together quickly and been done soon. however, i decided to put my thoughts and own special ideas into the mix and now i'm living a quilt project nightmare.

the simple idea: two charm packs of french general's pom pom de paris and some all-most solid neutral sashing made up in elizabeth hartman's modern charm squares baby quilt pattern. really, it should have been quilted and bound by now. but i had to start thinking.

initially, i spent about 2 hours arranging the squares somewhat randomly into the rows and piecing the rows together. it was a satisfying first round of work. the next time i sat down with this project, i cut the sashings and began attaching it all together. i had a silly moment of panic thinking i didn't have enough sashing fabric until i remembered that the fabric was folded in half for cutting and the pieces were twice as long as i was thinking they were. oh, for crying out loud! i even had one extra 5" wide strip leftover when it was all cut.

about half way through assembling the top, i thought (and this is where it all begins to go wrong), "this is such a straight forward design. why don't i mix it up a little? you know, be cool and modern a bit even though this is totally traditional french fabric? it'll be a traditional/modern collaboration!"

so i began playing with some ideas that involved varying the sashing widths and joining some of the block rows together. it started to look something like this:

 the problem with this was it wasn't mixed up enough. it almost looked like a mistake rather than some asymmetrical mix-up. i should have stopped right here and unpicked after the second or third skinny sashing and i probably would have been fine. but i didn't want to unpick, so i tried to work with it as was. big mistake #2. an unpick in time saves 9, as i was to learn the hard way.

i aimed for this next idea. if i took out one more sashing, i had enough extra to add an outer border, which would widen the quilt, which was feeling a bit long and skinny to me. girls look good long and skinny. quilts do not.

i fussed and fussed with how to place the rows i still hadn't sewn on in this configuration because moving the rows out of original position was throwing off my carefully structured randomness of the square placement. i had worked hard to scatter the various prints evenly through out. i finally found an acceptable solution which involved removing one end piece and replacing it with another.

this led to my first-ever fussy cut! i wanted to feature the butterflies, not the flowers. i was feeling pretty creatively smug at this point. "oh, i'm such an innovative, real quilter! i fussy cut and solved a huge problem with my own brilliant thinking. how clever of me." pride cometh before the fall, truly. if i had only known.

when i came back for round three of sewing, by which time i should have been quilting, i saw what a huge mess i'd made. after much deliberation, i decided that i was going to have to unpick. a lot. three rows unpicked later, i am in a huger quandary than ever.

i found a 3rd charm pack, which i'd recollected might be in my stash. it would allow me to add to the rows and widen the quilt. too bad i didn't do my recollecting before i unpicked those rows. but like all my great ideas so far, it just causes more problems with the quilt. i really don't have enough sashing to widen the quilt.

to explain something: the reason i'm even considering widening the quilt anyway is that the daughter this is intended for already has a baby/crib size quilt. she doesn't need two. so i was going to make this same pattern but bigger. which i didn't remember until too late.

widening needs new sashing. so i picked a new one at the store yesterday. sure, why not? i've already unpicked a lot of it. why not just throw out that sashing i wasn't liking so much anymore anyway?

i picked the eyelet solid i'd admired on veronica's chevron quilt. i thought it would add nice texture. of course i've rethought that now that i'm home. i'm not certain the styles match. to me, the eyelet is very american and rustic and the fabric is formal and, well, french. will it work together?

i am completely stuck.
how do i move forward on something like this?
someone please wake me up!

linking up with lee at freshly pieced

juggling

having more than one project going at a time can be fun, but it also means some projects take a backseat, getting pushed further and further behind. i have at least 3 prominent projects i'd like to complete immediately. finally, i've got a brainstorm of how to embellish "at last" and i'm still in the middle of "out on a limb." also, now that i know a bit more about sewing and quilting, i realize some mistakes i made when i started up "star cookie." that's lead to some decision making regarding unpicking stitches and possibly even more fixes than that. i'm torn between just moving ahead and redoing a major portion of what i've already done. one of the curses of a little knowledge, i suppose. when i didn't know any better, i was blissfully stitching away. can't do that now. i'm feeling a bit pressured to be done with these quilts not just because of the excited babies who keep saying, "is my blanket done?!" every time i touch them, but because i'm taking a quilt class next month and that will mean another project in the mix.

"star cookie" has been pinned together since october, which is a big no,no. i live in one of the driest places on earth, so i didn't worry too much about rust in the beginning. but now that i sew in the bawthroom, i need to get those pins out. so today while the 4 yr old had her bath and the 3 yr old played with some of my recent project scraps, i worked on unpicking a few of the handquilted seams i completed last october. (see how long it's taking me to decide and finish up this project?!) my problems lie in that i didn't square off the quilt sandwich before i began stitching and my straight piecing seams are not very straight, hence some discrepancies between the quilting lines and the fabric seams.  i think i'm going to compromise at unpicking the last few seams and leaving the rest. i really need to undo those because i ignorantly just followed the stripes on the fabric not knowing they weren't necessarily straight and definitely not in line with the previous stitching i'd done.

one good side effect: i know the marking pencil i've been using really will disappear because i can no longer see the guide marks i made last time i worked on this quilt.