Kill Your Darlings...

 

Sometimes no matter how much you like something, you have to recognize that it doesn't work and you have to get rid of it. In the block above, the color of the flowers in the blue triangle on the right match (and thus blend) perfectly with the blue in the fabric on the left.

This kinda breaks my heart as this fabric is the inspiration for the entire blue quilt. 

You can see that blue flowered triangles in the layout above. You can see that they attract the eye right away, and they also do not "read" as blue. There's a white flower up there, that is surrounded by blue and it reads as a "hole." That's a no-no.

Here I have covered up those flowered fabrics and the design really shines. What I want in this quilt is to emphasize the sharp blue triangles. Without those flowers, what you see is TRIANGLES. Which is what I want.

I also removed the light blues in the above blocks. These light blues "read" as too dark and were too close in value to some of the other blues that were used as "darks."

I ended up discarding 20 blocks, which is 12% of the total blocks on the design wall, so I had to make more blocks before I started to design the quilt for real.

And one more thing:

Am I the only quilter who has ever done this?

And I did it TWICE!

Kill Your Darlings

As I have said many times before, we ALL know when it's WRONG. We generally know when we've hit it out of the park, but the absolute HARDEST THING is that place in between - that place where what's on your worktable or design wall isn't going anywhere. The solution?

Be ruthless.

Kill your darlings.

Break it. Break it bad.

Change partners and dance.

The so-called gold I had been working with the last few days just wasn't going anywhere I wanted it to go. If it had simply been a project of my own, I might have stuck with it, but this quilt is designed to be a "how-to" lesson to make a Diamond quilt, and if I wasn't "feeling the love," I sure as hell couldn't convince anybody else to feel it either.

So I tossed the pieces off the wall and dug through my stash. I can show how to make a Diamond quilt in colors that anybody can reproduce. If I've learned anything from my students it's that if I give them good basics, they will figure out how to push ideas around on their own.



You should click, and then double click the photos to get a good look at the big prints. Some of them I've had almost ten years.

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...