Fussy Fussy Fussy

 I know you won't believe me, but I really don't have any idea where half my quilts are going when I start designing them. I have a GENERAL idea (this one is scrap slab triangles made from fabrics that have a lot of color on a black background), but I don't know any specifics until I really see what's happening when I stick all those blocks together. 

So the black triangles are up on the design wall, and now I am adding the side triangles of colored fabrics on white or cream backgrounds. And sometimes they are black on white with colors and basically whatever else I think looks good. 

 

Once I got going, I noticed something I liked - when two different fabrics sitting next to each other looked like they were one piece of fabric. You can see some of it in the photo above, but let me show you exactly what I mean.

In this quilt, one block is a black(ish) triangle with a lighter side triangle on each side, so the block makes a square, like in the photo above.

Backing up a bit, we see that the side triangles sit next to other light side triangles for the adjacent blocks. Here I have deliberately placed fabrics that emphasize that square block-y feel. But what if I DIDN'T do that? What if I made the pairs of side triangles that sit next to each other look like they belonged together? I don't want to make them the same, but I want the viewer to not notice they are different fabrics...

Kinda like this. Here are six pairs of light triangles arranged so you think they are the same fabric, so you don't notice the underlying square block.

So that is what I am playing with. I have more side triangles to put up on the design wall, and I have to decide if I want the patterns in the lights to do something - to make a secondary design - and if I do, then what do I want it to do? And there's an awful lot of busy here. Too much busy is not good, but organized busy is fine. I have a lot of juggling to do to get this to look really good. 

I like the high energy of it, so it will be a challenge to balance it all. As Oscar Wilde once famously said, "Oh, the anxiety - I hope it lasts forever."

I was shopping for fabric online a week or so ago and I needed one more yard for my order to qualify for free shipping, so I was cruising the Oriental section and saw this cat among some lotuses. Something about the eyes reminded me of Millie, so I ordered a yard of the fabric. Now this sweet girl will live in this quilt.

This is a Scrap Slab Triangle quilt. You can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop. It's an instant download, so you can get started right away. You will need the Tri-Recs Ruler set, which you can get at your LQS.