I don't know about how quilts behave for anyone else, but mine are all too often very "talkative", sometimes even "yelling" at me about what they want me to do next. All too often the first few ideas that I have for a set of blocks just doesn't make them happy and they refuse to cooperate with me as a result. No, they aren't live creatures but there are times when I'd swear they all but are for the way that they don't want to work the way I think they should!
At the present time I have two different quilts in process that are behaving like this. One is my London Tea towel quilt and it has been banished from my design floor at the moment because it just doesn't want to cooperate with me. Obviously I'm not listening well enough but the ideas are hovering in the background so maybe soon.
However, I did pull out one that has been sitting in 'time-out' for a couple of years because it had refused to cooperate with me. This is a block robin that I did with some friends that I'm in an online quilt group with. I always have a lot of fun with them and love being in round robins with them because they do such great work.
This block robin started with a piece of cross-stitch that I finished back in 1990. (Yes I have oodles of cross-stitch UFO's in addition to all of the quilty ones, but that is another story all together. LOL) Since getting the original blocks back in 2011 I have not made any progress on it because I just couldn't get them arranged in a way that I liked. Pic to the right shows how it looked as of the last time that I had tried to arranged the blocks and sections.
Last night i finally figured out that what was tripping me up were the pink/turquoise blocks that were arranged around one block. That arrangement just kept the focus on that single block instead of playing nicely with all of the other parts.
Once I finally 'heard' what the quilt had been trying to tell me all along (ok so I'm a wee bit hard of hearing and stubborn at times) then the answer was apparent. So frog-stitching was the first order of the day today to remove the half-square triangle block border strips. Once that was done then I could rearrange the main blocks again and start filling in the gaps with all of the filler blocks that I already had.
Next up was to make a 9" block that brought more of the yellow from the cross-stitch into the quilt. For that I made an Ohio Star block with yellow points and a gold center. Next up to be made are a 6" block for the bottom left and about 7 - 3" blocks to fill in the bigger areas of the top. I'm still thinking about what to do with the star at the upper left. First thought is to take the turquoise framing strips off and replace them with WOW's ones. I'm sure that the quilt will let me know if it doesn't like my first idea....or the second one.....or third......lol. I'm just glad to be finally making progress on this critter.
Gratitudes:
1. Good kids in all of my classes this year.
2. For the extra income over the summer that has helped make ends in the budget meet better.
I'm getting ready to send out a sign up notice for a block robin swap to a group that I'm a part of, and am considering what I want to start out with. Last time I did this I used a piece of cross-stitch that I'd stitched yrs before and never did anything with. And will be doing the same thing this time as well. There are two pieces that I'm debating about using - I've added a picture of these to this post. The floral piece is from about 15 yrs ago, and measures out at about 6.5" by 27.5" as it is now, and the second piece is 11.5" by 17.5" and was dated 1990 for the completion of the stitching. Needless to say it's about time that I do something with both of them......LOL.
