Well,
Miss P's time has finally come. The blocks have been sitting at the end of the small ironing board that is to the right of my sewing table, most of them for the better part of a year, and I've had a few on a small design wall behind it to enjoy as I worked on other stuff. After the
Homespun stars came down off the wall I wasted no time in putting them up before some unsuspecting squirrel butted into line.
There wasn't a lot of thinking, I just wanted to get them up and then see what might need to be moved around. LUV. My design wall is wider than it is tall so I've been having to crane my neck to imagine what it will look like vertically, but I am really liking what I see. And it also received high praise from The Official Cookie Tester, so that was good too.
It has had a bit of time to 'steep' which has allowed for the odd block twirl or switch-up to ensure that all of the darker backgrounds are well distributed. The one block that is giving me a bit of grief is the deep purple in the upper right corner, and it has since the day that I sewed it. I feel that it's just too dark. In hindsight, I probably would have been smarter to make the background on it in a lighter fabric so that it didn't carry so much weight. I'll live with it for now but if it really starts to bug me I might just make a replacement.
Time to start stitching!....M
3 comments:
So pretty! Laura
Your blocks are amazing! Love all the soft pretty colour. Maybe the rogue purple one could be a feature on the back?
I think your block layout looks fantastic and I would resist the urge to remove that darker purple block in the top row. Look at that photo of the blocks on your wall again. You have another dark block in the bottom row just left of center that balances the one in the top row really nicely. Have you tried turning that photo on your design wall into gray scale to check your values without getting distracted by color? Often when I'm working with many different fabrics as you are I get bogged down in the details of this block or that one as I'm sewing it and worry about one fabric being "too dark" or "too light" at the block level. But when I photograph all of the blocks on the design wall and then switch the photo to grayscale/black and white, I almost always decide that the fabrics that looked wrong zoomed in at a micro level are actually adding a lot of interest when you step back and look at the macro level. Areas of higher contrast here and there in the quilt viewed as a whole help to move your eye around the quilt as a viewer, creating that sense of sparkle and movement, making some quilt blocks appear to recede and others to visually appear closer to the viewer. When we "fix" and eliminate those blocks that have more or less contrast than the others, the result is often a finished quilt that feels more static and less interesting than it might have been if we'd left those "zing" blocks in the quilt. Of course it is your quilt and not mine, though, so whatever you are most comfortable with is your best path forwards. This quilt is gorgeous already; I am in love with it!
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