Murder

A famous piece of advice for writers is "kill your darlings." It means if something isn't working, you need to get rid of it, no matter how much you love it, or how much work you've put into it.

As soon as I made these two letters from the word FLY, I knew what I had been trying to deny for days.

The PIGS have to go.  I'll show you.

The LY letters are light and flirty, but if those letters fly, then the PIGS are definitely earthbound. Flying pigs are supposed to be whimsical, but real life pigs aren't.

Of course my "wings" won't be selvages, I just threw those up on the wall to see if my idea for wings would work. I don't think it will. Those will probably go too.

And I am even considering tossing out the WHEN.

Ah yes, murder...

Shove Over!

You can't tell how things look until you move them around. I thought I wanted PIGS to be centered under WHEN, like this:

It just didn't sing for me.

I slid the word PIGS over a bit to the right, and it looks better. It gives a sense of movement, like this is going somewhere.

Why? Arranging items in a diagonal increases tension.

Now I have to work on FLY.

Diagonal Hell

I'm always telling students they have to make sure to add enough fabric to letters with diagonals, because if they don't, "they'll bite you in the butt."  See the piece of backing fabric I had to add at the point of this big triangle? This what I mean, but in this case, it isn't a problem.

In this photo, I didn't add enough fabric on under the H so that when I sewed the long diagonal seam I got too close to the selvage edge.

I'm going to leave it as is, because this piece will be used as a teaching sample, and won't be quilted. I can tell students to leave extra fabric, but when they actually see the error, it will make them think twice.

Hopefully.

It's The Little Things

Can you spot the difference between these two?

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Piggy Piggy Piggy

I usually tell my students not to get too literal.

But since pigs do NOT fly (except in airplanes), I felt I could make PIGS from pig fabric. (Of course I fussy cut these letters.) I really like these piggy letters, and will use them in the final quilt.

Here's the fabric I used. Pretty homely, huh?


Rebecca asked a question in the comments yesterday, what did I do with my "dud" letters? Rebecca, stay tuned, I'll answer that question in a day or two!

W-H-E-N-P-I

I've started making the pink letters for the Flying Pigs quilt.

I have to start somewhere, and I always start with the first letter of the first word of the phrase and go from there.  I thought I'd carry some fabric from the first letter into the second, and so on, but I'm not quite sure that really works.

I picked some fabrics particularly because they reminded me of the curly tails we associate with pigs.

This is a good start, even though I'll probably re-make a few letters.

Flying Pigs (again)

It's amazing what you can find on the internet. A search for "Flying Pigs" yielded a lot of cute images, but also pointed me to Spoonflower, where I found this:

These little pigs are about 2" across (or 5cm)

I am going to have SO MUCH FUN with this!

Flying Pigs Anybody?

Julie challenged me to a Flying Pig quilt-along. While I have an idea of where I'm going with it, I haven't started yet.  But I do have fabric.

Here are pinks from my stash.

Here are some pinks that I purchased for this project.

Of course I had to order some pig fabric.

And I even bought some flying pig fabric!

Heh!