In my first two quilts, I really wanted a painterly feel to them, with no obvious visual structure. So I relied largely on appliqué, and did not use blocks or geometric shapes that fit neatly together.
Well, this time I’ve decided to give in.
I’ve been resisting it because it seems too “mathematical” to me, and somehow my brain interprets that as “not artistic.” But the way I see it, if I have any chance of finishing this quilt (it is rather large), I’d better do something more tried-and-true. That doesn’t mean that I have to be unoriginal, it just means that I don’t have to take on a re-invention of the wheel.
The first image shows some part of the design so far. I can’t wait until the blocks are done so I can sew ’em all together! I wanna see them connected now!
I did a lot of prep-work to plan out all the blocks, including calculating the finished size of the quilt, graphing out my design sketch, scanning it into Photoshop, and enlarging each “block” in the grid to the desired finished size. I saved each of the 36 blocks as a separate file, and printed a few out, laying them next to each other to see that the measurements were working. (Hah! How’s that for not paying one red cent for a quilt-designing computer program? I’m so stubborn…)
I’m adding seam allowances to the squares as I go, so I did not include them in the printout dimensions. Several weeks ago, I pre-cut all the gray background squares to the same dimensions, and now I’m using the printed blocks as templates to cut my curved pieces of orange fabric to go on top, creating the image.
There’s still some tweaking to do as far as colors in the orange. I’ll be using heat-settable silkscreening paints to add some details, as well as stitching with different colors of thread. Maybe some blues and some more yellows? I’m not entirely sure yet, but I’m definitely antsy to get moving on it!