At the last Sew Day Mary and I decided we would make another donation quilt in an hour. Neither of us brought a sewing machine, so we just played around with some blocks and shards that Mom donated.
Mom is clearing out stuff she doesn’t want and quilt projects she won’t finished.
These are not really my style and they are all odd sizes, but we can make them fit together in some way.
We started out by just putting them on the design wall and looking at them. Tim stopped by Sew Day and helped us play around with them. Three brains are definitely better than one.
We got rid of one block that was the same pattern, but just much busier than the others (bottom center block). It didn’t really go. The butterfly was not sewn by my Mom and that one was out, too. I really wanted to put all the blocks in so there were none left, but that isn’t always possible.
We tried spreading out the blocks and imagining other fabrics or blocks in between.
I think it is harder to imagine what could between blocks when you don’t have any extra fabric with which to work. When we did the Improve charity tops, Maria and Cyndi both brought big bins of solids we could use.
Still, we thought we had a good selection of blocks and some possibilities.
We automatically put the largest block in the center, but started talking about not having it in the center. What could we do if we put it somewhere else in the top?
Moving the largest block down and the Ying/Yang blocks (those with the crazy circle fabric prominently placed) to the center made the piece a weird shape, but we liked the location of the blocks better. We will probably cut off the yellow square on the bottom and use the yellow in some other location. We finally started to feel like we were getting somewhere.
Part of the issue is that none of use these types of fabrics. My Mom has a unique fabric selection style that people love and is hard to imitate.
We finally ended up adding some of the leftover purple and lilac squares from the Celestial Squares quilt to bring out the purples in the batik. Those fabrics are unconventional choices, but I think they work.
We have plans to sew it together next time, but we will see.