How Do You Eat a Whale?

 

This is the big pile of fabric that I have to sort through. I emptied all the big bins on the floor. This is what I have to sort through.

So, to answer the question... How do you eat a whale? 

One bite at a time. I grab a pile of fabric, move it to my worktable so I don't have to grab it off the floor, and sort through it, tossing the fabric into the appropriate bin.

This is after about an hour of sorting I had this. The bings were filling up and the pile on the floor was getting smaller.

This is after three and a half hours.

I had to take a break and eat and get dressed. But after a break, I got it finished.

It looks good!

I'm going to start by making slabs of the fabrics in the Lights bin. I'm going to make slabs of fabrics with a white background, but I'm going to have some fun. 

Forty-Six Squares

 

Here are my forty-six squares. One of the things that makes a successful Slashed squares quilt is that half of the blocks have to have busy outsides and calm insides, and the other half have to have busy insides and calm outsides. I really didn't follow that rule very much when I paired the fabrics for these blocks. I just paired fabrics I thought looked good together. These are in no real order and I haven't even decided if I will use them all but it's been a fun process and an interesting way to tame the fabric mess I've got.

If you click the photo, you'll enlarge it and you can see all the fabrics up close and in great detail.

Patience Is a Virtue

Patience is a virtue, and I want some right now!

I simply HAVE to wait for my beta testers to work through their process and my editors need time to review the tutorial, so I, and everybody else, has to wait.

Preliminary feedback is very good, so I am able to say quite honestly that this will be worth the wait. You all know how much I love to provide good, useful, and easily understandable instructions. The Zebra quilts are not what you would call "simple." They are actually quite complex, as anybody who makes one will discover. However I think you will find it is worth the wait. As you have seen, these quilts have quite an impact.

I am rather embarrassed to say that I am cleaning the studio, and it was never so messy. I had so much fabric on the floor I can't believe it. As you can see from the photo above, the area around the front of  my design wall is clear. The design wall is empty also. I have stacked the "leftover" big triangles, and I grouped them according to which triangle they are. Makes my life easier.

(by the way, I am struggling with Blogger's new design format, so if things look funky, that's why. It will become default at the end of June so far I am resisting...)

This was the view looking back toward my cutting table last night. See that pile of fabric along the left? It was as high as my knee. There was all kinds of stuff hiding there. I've been stacking what I can on the cutting table at the end of the studio (and the top of the picture). What I can fold I've been putting back in the stash, but I clearly need another solution because

as you can see, the bookshelf is pretty full.

Yes, It's Ugly.

Yes, It's ugly.

There.

I said it.

This is the result of the most recent tinkering. I haven't cut more fabric yet.

Did you think I didn't know? Did you think I couldn't tell?

Did you think, "Oh look, she's human. She screwed up." 

Did you wonder "HOW is she gonna make this look good?"

Did you think, "Even she can't redeem THIS?"

(And before you tell me it might not be THAT BAD, the answer is, yeah, I know that too. But "Good Enough" has never been my working motto, and this sure as hell won't be an exception to that.)

Would you believe me if I said I can agree to most of them? Because I know I can fix it. How do I know?

Well, see, I went to Art School and I studied design and color, so I know the rules. I've been sewing for over 50 years and I made my first quilt over 40 years ago. So I kinda have experience. I've been there, and I've done that. I have been getting myself into and out of creative pickles for years, so this one isn't going to stop me.

And I live for this sh*t stuff. There's nothing more I like than a puzzle, and this is nothing more than a big creative puzzle.

So let's look at the stuff I don't like.

This is a detail of the very first picture in yesterday's post. What I don't like are the way the dark bars connect from the yellow to the pink and into the blue. And right next to that, the violet and blue bars do the same thing.

I actually LIKE the flip-flip-flip of the light and dark values, and the way the diagonals make this thing look like the blinking lights on a marquee. It's VERY ENERGETIC, and that's a Positive way of looking at it. Some people think IT'S TOO BUSY, which is a Negative way of looking at it. My friend Allison says her eyes go cuckoo when she looks at some of my quilts. I actually wrote to her yesterday and apologized for what I was doing to her.  "SUCH A PAL!" she wrote back. "I've been looking at the pics with squinty eyes."

Actually, in this case it really is TOO MUCH, and I have to calm it down a bit. But I won't shut that flip-flip-flip down entirely, because that's one of the things I like best about this design.

This is from the second photo in yesterday's post. I made the picture smallish so you could see it on your screen without having to scroll up and down. There is way too much dark clumped here. If you're a regular reader you know I go harping on and on about distributing your values (lights and darks) throughout a quilt. This version has too many darks on the right side. But look again, The top right diamond has the darks on the right, and the lower one has them on the left. If you look at it the right way, you can see a wave effect, or a backwards S curve. In this particular quilt, I do not want to emphasize that shape, but this is a perfect example of a goof gone good. Had I not MADE that mistake I would never have SEEN that shape. That's the kind of thing I will file away for later use. It's why making mistakes can often be a very good thing, because they make you see stuff that you wouldn't see otherwise.

This was at the very bottom of the last picture in yesterday's post, and IN THEORY there's nothing wrong with it. The light fabric in the purple/swirl purple block is placed correctly. HOWEVER, because that swirly purple is a darker VALUE than the light around it (and it is actually an EQUAL value to the blue right next to it), this fabric pair fails in this quilt.

This presents an interesting conundrum. If I make ALL the fabric pairs with a very high contrast of light and dark, then the flip flip flip will look like FLIP FLIP FLIP, Allison will go cuckoo, and it will just be too much too look at. (Although I think the so-called design concept of "giving the eye a place to rest" is a bunch of malarkey. But that's a different discussion....)

However is is precisely this that makes this current iteration of the design fail. There is too much high-contrast and it isn't evenly distributed to move your eye around in a pleasing way.

And THIS doesn't do me any favors either. In real life, it's a very pretty combination, but up on the design wall if looks greyish, and muddy.  Gotta go.

So what have we learned? That in order to rescue this quilt, I have to tame the FLIP FLIP FLIP by reducing the number of blocks with a strong LIGHT/DARK contrast, distribute the values better overall and remove the blocks with a limited contrast in each pair. I also have to add more color. There is too much cream and white. But remember, this whole thing started because I was getting stuff out of my stash I wasn't happy with.

Like I said to Julie before I went to bed last night, "Can you imagine this quilt with fabrics I actually love?"

And right there, bingo, X marks the spot, is the biggest reason for the failure of this version. I am not really being true to myself. How can I make a quilt a magnificent symphony if I'm using fabrics that don't sing?

Fabric Intervention

 

I've been cleaning the studio. I've folded a lot of fabric, as you can see.

There isn't any room to put it away in the bookcase.

I think I need a fabric intervention.

It's a work in progress.

It's slow going, but this makes me feel so much better!

I am finding a lot of fabric that I don't remember.

This is so much better. I still have a lot of work to do, but it will be a lot easier to work when it is all neat and clean. I can't remember how long it's been since it was really neat, so it's long overdue.

 

The Stack

Making slabs is a lot more fun than folding fabric and sorting it. Sunday night while I "watched" TV (after the crushing final play of the Patriots game), I cut triangles from the green slabs.

No, I don't know how many there are.

This many! LOL!

I have a lot of green scrap slab triangles, and I have a lot of purples and I have a lot of pinks. Ought to be a really pretty quilt. I guess that's up next.

I picked up a lot of the fabric scraps that were all over the floor and folded and put away some fabric. It's not as clean as I want it to be and I still do have to fold and put fabric away (as well as replenish my green fabric stash) but it's a start.

CHERIE... You are hilarious!

Cleaning Up the Green

I used virtually every piece of green fabric I had in my Early Autumn quilt and made an epic mess in my studio.

 I had a lot of pieces left over, and a lot of triangles that never made it ino trees.

Rather than fold all the little scraps and put them away, I decided to make slabs and cut them into triangles.

This is a much more fun way to clean the studio.

My Dad came over and put the molding back up in the kitchen, so the fridge move is now officially complete.

Scrap Clean Up

I've made over 50 purple scrappy triangles and it's time to move on to a different color. I decided to  make scrappy triangles using the scraps that are left on my worktable. What the heck, you have to make life a little interesting! So I sorted the fabrics on the table by color.  I've also cleaned up the rest of the studio a bit so I don't feel so bad working in there.

It was really hot today. It was 80 degrees at 9 in the morning. I worked in the rock garden right outside my kitchen window for an hour. One of the plants that is doing surprisingly well are the garlic chives. They grow anywhere, are tall and have pretty white flowers. I'm going to add more!