happy mistakes with anna maria

courthouse steps block for gypsy wife with inner and outer pieces of amh fabric

inspiring thoughts on spontaneity from an instagram post by anna maria (horner) perry: 

 I am thinking today about the ability to be spontaneous. I think what I feared most in writing and designing a patchwork book is that having the task of 16 projects laid out ahead of me would ruin any chance to be spontaneous. I find this youthful, often reckless, creative pursuit so imperative when I am designing. I also find that one can really only be spontaneous if you allow yourself to be continually curious. Trying out things I might be certain won’t work aesthetically but seeing something that does work in the process is part of my curiosity practice. In the book I talk a lot about structure, planning and execution. And in sharing these hallmarks of my work with you, most opportunities to be spontaneous in the projects came in fabric choices and colors. Then there are simple mistakes, that if given a moment might not be mistakes. This one project, the Spontaneity Quilt (as it happens), has the smallest delightful feature that snuck up on me when I was laying out the blocks on the design wall. The lower center Grandmother’s Fan was inadvertently turned the wrong way when I had planned to make all of them scallop around the center. But I liked it. But my plan! Never-minding the plan I gave that fan a stem and some leaves to support its insistence on being a flower. Here’s to embracing the blips. 

12 south quilt back with a large piece of a loulouthi print by amh

anna maria horner, now anna maria perry, has been a favorite fabric designer of mine for years. her bold, colorful prints are irresistible. everything is color-saturated and luscious. statement fabrics are her specialty, although she also excels at colorful, dazzling blenders and supporting prints, too.

her thoughts on spontaneity and embracing mistakes as part of the creative process sat well with me today. i love the way she is not afraid but rather curious to try ideas that might not be aesthetically pleasing. sometimes these ideas don't work out, but sometimes we're really surprised by a winning combination we never imagined would be so good. that's an exhilarating feeling!

"spinning elizabeths" fabric pull, mostly amh

as jolene has said and normalized for me, i don't have to love everything i make in the end. but engaging in the creative process with an open mind and spontaneous attitude is a real thrill. you'll never know unless you try. i make my girls try on clothing they think they don'  like all the time for this reason - try it and see. only then will you know if you truly like it or not. give yourself a chance to be pleasantly surprised.

still not sure what i think of this one, but i'm excited to finish it

then there's the mistakes that turn out to not be mistakes. i love these so much. i do something not-according-to-plan and end up with a better outcome than i was aiming for. i say "yes!" to embracing the blips! 

i'm trying to think of when i've done that and can't come up with an obvious example. i think this might be because once embraced, i forget they weren't part of the plan and just accept that's they way they were meant to be and are. lovely.

so, i second anna maria:

• be continually curious
• mistakes given a moment might not be mistakes
• nevermind the plan
• embrace the blips

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:

last chevron class

monday was the last day of my beginner's quilting class for the chevron quilt. i had to skip week 3 because the mr. had a last-minute business trip come up. last minute, as in he tells me sunday afternoon he's flying to vegas in the morning. and the kids have appointments all day. so i missed last week's class session and stayed clear through the night class this week in hopes of getting near completion.

i loved seeing everyone else's nearly-finished quilts as they worked on their bindings. i am always surprised with how different each quilt looks because of the fabric choices even though we all use the same pattern. (you can click on the photo to get a better look at the quilts.)

veronica used a robert kauffman eyelet-style ivory solid for the neutral on her quilt. i love the added dimension and unique look it gave her project.

loni was making a quilt for her daughter, an only girl with 3 brothers. so the front is bold colors and houndstooth fabrics. not very feminine by choice. but for the backing she found this lovely little floral that had all the same colors as her chevrons. it's a perfect touch that is subtly feminine. then she bound it in black with tiny white polka dots like the floral fabric.

louise demonstrating attatching binding

while everyone else was oohing and aahing over louise's quilting work (she long-arm quilts as well as teaches) and getting their binding started, i was getting my top finished off. the main panel was still in four pieces and it needed borders. after the first class, i accidentally mixed up my rows and had sewn some of the middle of the quilt to the bottom of it by pairing the wrong white rows together. i didn't immediately undo them, waiting to see if maybe it wouldn't matter. but when i had all the pieces done, i decided it did matter and would need to be fixed. it just threw off the flow of the quilt to have the rows rearranged.

so i unpicked everything at home and got to work reassembling in class. however, when i was done, it was glaringly obvious there was now a different problem.

you can see it, right? that row of white diamonds where there is supposed to be a chevron. (i was not the only student to do this, by the way.) oh, boy. it was fixable if i unpicked the seam i'd just sewn and moved a block from one end of the quilt to the other. but i so did not want to do that. louise talked me in to leaving my "happy mistake" as a special design feature. this is the first time i've had one of these. i've seen them before on other people's work and usually like them, but it was a first for me. oh, well. it is okay and we are moving on.

my next challenge came when putting on the borders. while there was a lot of leftover solids from the kit, the blue floral i needed for the borders was running short. i was supposed to cut 7 strips 5 1/2" wide, but i could only squeeze out 6. the remaining fabric was literally 1/4" too short. i couldn't believe it. fortunately, i had my scraps from the chevron rows with me and i was able to get some short strips out of them. when all was done, i had about 5" leftover. that's very little breathing room!

the photo is of my pieced border (wrong side up) at bottom, the last strip that was 1/4" short under the ruler at top, and the little square that is my only remaining scrap, to the right. i was sweating this one out and wondering how the heck i was going to make do if i didn't have enough. thank goodness i eked out what i needed!

having all the rows together and the borders on makes for one huge piece of fabric to maneuver around. it always feels so strange to work with such large pieces after all the tiny piecing at the beginning of a project. and then i put together the back which is just yards and yards of material. turns out i was a bit short there, too. the backing didn't come with the kit and i think maybe i had more at home, but i just used part of the fabric intended for the binding as a filler to make it stretch. i double bought for the binding, but it still may be close. we'll see when i get to that point.

i had high hopes of getting started on the machine quilting before i had to go home, but, as usual, i underestimated how long it was going to take. i did manage to get the whole thing sandwiched and basted (yay!) and then i made the binding. at least i came home with what looks like a quilt. i'm just going to echo quilt all the chevrons, which should be fairly easy. this quilt should be knocked out in another month or two. almost there!

oh, what to do next? that's always the fun part to decide.

louise does have this fun quilt going for class the next two months:

there are even two options: the simpler quartered block or the union jack looking one for the more confident beginner. it's quite tempting. it might even be a good use for my strawberry fields layer cake. i was daydreaming about actually mixing the block styles in the quilt so i wouldn't have to do all of those hst's with mini sashing. but it probably won't happen.

and i'm itching to do something of my own design again. i found out this round i don't really like working with a kit. as much as i liked the way the kit looked, it makes me feel like an assembler and less like the quilt is my own creation when it was all picked out for me. some people like color-by-numbers. not me. i like at least selecting my own fabrics even if i'm using a pattern. and i really enjoy the surprise of watching it come together since you're never really sure exactly what it's going to look like beforehand. all that fun was gone with the kit. it makes me even happier i purchased the pow wow quilt instead of getting the kit.