Tuesday, February 28, 2012

spring break

I'm visiting with my parents for a few days over spring break, and I decided to try to wade some of the left-behind fabric. Probably not a good idea, but then, neither was stumbling upon www.ikeahackers.net.

In the flotsam and jetsam of fabric, I found a B&N bag with patches in it from a long abandoned sampler project. After a few hours of frogging seams, I remember why.

this is nothing that goes together! most of these aren't even the same size! oh, to be young and foolish again...

so I spent the afternoon trying to make sense of it. I had decided initially to sash things to make them fit with other blocks. In some cases, this was fine, in others, it was a very disruptive attempt at order our of chaos.

I did a web search of "sampler quilts" and was slightly dissapointed to not find anything like this. What I noticed, and what was less surprising was that most of the samplers followed some sort of colorway, which this does not. There were a few interesting mod sampler quilts. Again, they had an organized and preempted colorway.

I honestly can't remember why I made this design choice. This project exploded from a long past issue of Quilt Sampler Magazine. The article off of which the sample project was based had made two projects for her sons, each one telling his life's story up until that point. I probably had some romantic notion about a story in blocks, which is why I forged ahead as a novice with out a second thought to picking a colorway, as the article's quilter had. To my delight, there is enough commonality between certain blocks that the color families are similar.
To my dismay, the blocks are of such uneven sizes that I will probably have to make a few more before this is all over. Looking at some of the mod quilts, I thought it possible to piece together the blocks into chunks, then sash the sample chunks together with a solid background, letting the chunks float as mini quilts in one larger piece.

Perhaps I'll just wait to see how far this last ditch stitching effort gets me.



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