Blue Ice Becomes Making Waves

 I always tell my students to push beyond something that they think looks good.

Breaking apart the central medallion style of one version yielded something interesting.

The nice thing about digital photography is that you can take pictures to store an interesting variation for future review. I really liked this, but didn't want to make a lot more blocks to fully explore the idea so I cheated (improvised). 

This is not my design wall. I took pictures, then printed them on paper, made copies, cut apart the blocks and started playing.

By the time I got this far I knew it was a design I would sew together.

This arrangement is a bit too "regular" for my taste. I will have to break it up a bit more, but that shouldn't be a problem.

I'm still wrestling with how to arrange the fabrics, but I know I don't want something with this much contrast. When I feel ready, I will go in the studio and start cutting up fabric. It's been cold lately and being in there when I am cold is not much fun.

AT ANY RATE...

I can hear some of you.. "BUT LYNNE, you were thinking about long rectangles, and blue ice. This is squares and it looks like waves of water..."

And this is when I tell you to STOP BEING SO DARN LITERAL and to GO WITH THE FLOW. Just because you started with one idea, doesn't mean you're married to it. You should see what happens when you play. You find a new direction and follow that. It is called being creative. Do I know where this will lead? I do not. Do I worry I will screw up? No. What if it doesn't work? I will fix it. I will come up with another idea and try that. Does this frighten me? No. Will I waste fabric? That depends on your definition of waste. If it helps me figure out where I am going and I end up making a killer quilt, working up to that idea will not be wasteful, so my answer is no. Your fabric isn't doing you any good on the shelf.

WHAT I WILL PROBABLY DO... Is just play with these ideas, and then put them all away and start cutting fabric and making blocks and putting them up on the design wall and go from there. I don't want this to be overworked and too fussy.

Loose Ends!

1. The replacement 3' x 4' mat arrived today.

2. I will never, ever, ever use EQ to design my quilts. I can design quilts without it. Besides things look different on a design wall to scale that a computer image cannot duplicate.

3. The fabrics for the 58 Carats quilt were collected over a period of 30 years. They come from different designers, different manufacturers and many of them are in the 10 - 30 year old range. They are not available now, and most certainly do not come in "a set." There are Philip Jacobs, Kaffe Fassett and Tula Pink, along with a host of others I do not know. Most are unavailable now.

4. The Waltzing Matilda quilt will eventually live with a friend in Sydney, Australia.

Amish Variations

When I decided to recreate my favorite Amish quilt, I didn't think I do more with it, but once I got the fabrics home I couldn't help but compare the solids I had selected to the existing fabrics in my stash.

I thought, "Gee, wouldn't it be fun to push that idea around. How far could I go?"  Making a version with blenders would be one idea. Here is part of it. Actually, I think it's a snoozefest (translation: boring.) I don't have enough of the green fabric on the bottom to go all the way around. If I decide to finish it, I'd have to go fabric shopping.

Here's a batik version. I haven't sewn this up together yet. I decided to make these all the same size because, what the heck, I had the fabric and it was easier than recreating a new set of dimensions. I don't really consider this version particularly successful - the batiks are all too busy. In the real world I would use fabrics of different scales of pattern. Still though, it's a fun variation on the original.

I almost didn't make this one, but I'm really glad I did because I like it a lot. I'm not thrilled with the green here, but I was trying to find something that was a value match to the original. It's a tough green to find, and I wanted something with a largish scale. Still though, I count this as a success.

There's one other version in the works. It came about when I saw fabrics in my stash I thought might work. I'm really pleased I tried it, because I think it works. I'll have to go shopping for the green, but oh gee darn, how tough is that? This one just goes to show that sometimes the stuff out of left field is a lot more interesting than anything obvious. (Which is sort of obvious, really, because the obvious is usually dull as dishwater.)


*All these photos will enlarge when clicked, and then supersize when clicked again.