Flip and Flop

After the not-success of diamonds in the bottom area of this quilt, I wondered if I should just fill it with the lightest of the black on white fabrics and see what happened.  What happened was I got mush and mush is never good.

But there was one more option. The other day I had tried making diamonds of the darker black on white fabrics, and that seemed to be too much like a whack upside the head. Maybe I needed a gentler approach?

Here I made the diamonds the lightest of the black on white fabrics, and surrounded them (mostly) with the darker black on white fabrics.  I like this  a lot better, The lightest diamonds disappear like I wanted them to, but the integrity of the overall design is maintained.  I'll look at this over the next few days, and then I'll start sewing these blocks together.

By the way, this isn't the whole quilt. The bottom part was so close to the floor I had to get down on my hands and knees to work on it, which wasn't helping. So I folded up the long vertical rows and pinned them higher up on the design wall so I could work comfortably.

This is the whole thing. The five big vertical rows are sewn together. Four more seams and the top will be complete. It will measure 60" x 66".

And now to reply to some of your comments:

Somebody asked if I was going to make the top like the bottom. NO! Because to do that I would have had to rip out six blocks and then recreate the black on white diamonds like I did on the bottom. The hardest part of THAT was I was running out of my really light fabrics, and let's face it... One long diamond block had eight different black on white fabrics, and those fabrics could not be adjacent to each other in neighboring blocks. It was a logistical nightmare in the extreme to make the ones I did make. I was in no mood to rip things out and go through that again!

I considered adding some White On Whites to the bottom of the first photo of yesterday's post, but that would have added an element that was not present in the rest of the quilt. It wouldn't have fit, and it would have been the lightest light area in the whole quilt, and it would have been concentrated at one part of the quilt, and that kind of contrast would have drawn the eye there. That's a design flaw, so nope.

I also nixed the idea of a zig-zag edged quilt. It would have been too cutesy and too tricky. I don't mean tricky = difficult, I mean like a trick, like bad thing. I wanted to suggest the idea of floating panels, but I had no intention of representing them literally. (Remember, I can draw anything I want and make it look exactly like it is, so if I want a picture, I'll draw one.)

Adding "piano keys" of light blue to the bottom would have added another element that was not present in the rest of the quilt. It would have been a "what is THAT for?" or "Where did THAT come from?" and therefore not an option.

I had to continue with the black on white fabrics, because that was an element that was common throughout the quilt. It's another reason why I also did not use any of the "new" fabrics I bought recently.

I've always felt that at some point, a quilt starts making demands. "The quilt wants this, the quilt wants that..." What's really happening is a design develops and you have to respond to it, but find ways to continue to what's going on in the quilt and yet expand upon the idea that is there. I tell people that the farther you get along with stuff like this the more limited your options become. In other words, every choice you make informs yet limits the choices you have yet to make. So in order to continue the design I had yesterday (in order to make it cohesive), there were some things I simply could not do.










If you are interested in making a scrap slab quilt like this one, you can get my tutorial in my Etsy shop, here. It's an instant download, so you can get started right away!