The Next Thing

I'm going to take a few days off. Christmas is coming, and I want to relax a bit and plan the next thing. There are a few things I have to do, like prepare the backings for the Holiday Quilt, the Sparkling Winkel Quilt and the Dark Majesty Quilt. Mostly I want to relax, lounge on the couch and read a few books, take it easy. Year End is always busy at work, and I don't want to stress myself out. I also bought a new laptop since my current one is running out of hard drive space, and getting slower and slower. I have to set up the new one, and I don't want it to be "work." I want to take my time about it.

I will be making another Scrap Slab Triangle quilt, and this time I want to play a bit more with the black and white side triangles. I want them to do a bit more work instead of sinking into the background. We'll see how that goes. I won't get started on that until January.

I also want to do some thinking.

I'm thinking about the next tutorial. Or I should say tutorials, plural, because what I have in mind is going to be rather complicated.

I'm thinking of doing a series of tutorials about free pieced letters, how I make them, and how I make them unique. Sure I've posted LOTS of pictures about them over the years, but this will be everything I have to say about them in one place.

I want to talk about not only how to make the letters, but how to make them special and give them some pizzazz. At some point I'll talk about getting them the same size and lining them up.

I also want to talk about "kerning" which is the space between them,

and all the other little things nobody tells you that can make all the difference in the world, like when to go cuckoo, like the second A in the word SALAD, above.

I can already tell you it will not be ONE tutorial. Right now I see at least five - because to me there are five groups of letters - and they are grouped based on their construction. I'll take one group at a time. There's a lot to say, and I can't fit all the things I can do with 26 upper case letters and the 12 or 15 or so lower case letters (the ones that aren't merely smaller version of their upper case relatives) in 20 MB of space, which is the size limit of file that can be uploaded to Etsy. So that's rolling around in my head.

I won't start writing the tutes until I know more about what I want to say, so don't you all start asking me questions about them just yet. Except that, yes, at least five, probably as many as 8 tutorials, and they will be sold separately.

I'm also thinking about getting you all taking pictures of things that grab your attention and using those pictures as colors stories or inspiration for your quilts. I'm THINKING about that because I have to figure out how to EXPLAIN something to you that I do without even being aware of it.

And EVERYBODY wants me to write a tutorial about using COLOR and dammit, if I can figure out a way to do it that makes it easy then I will do it, but really I think knowing how to use the fabric you already own is a better use of your time, and I already did that.

And for those of you visiting from Millie's blog because she is officially semi-retired from blogging, and want to find out how she is doing, she is just fine, as you can see.