catching up with myself

Ok, I cannot keep my hands of this thing; I got the (initial) layout of the doilies quilt done today. Tim took baby bear for a bike ride and was conveniently distracted for some hours by the military-industrial complex's contribution to Seafair (aka fighter jets flying in formation). Not my cup of tea but that's fine because I was at home with sudden and unexpected free time on my hands. So I laid out the quilt.

To recap, the quilt will consist of thirty-five blocks of nine patches each; eighteen blocks will be white (and shades thereof) and seventeen will have coloured embroidery on them. When I cut the embroidered patches out I attempted to get large motifs square and centre and to have them fill up the patch as much as possible. Not always achievable and in order to use up as much of the doily as possible I also cut out several partial patches. These partial patches were then sewn together in such a way as to get as much embroidery in as I could. Ok, that's the coloured embroidered patches.

The white patches I cut out of the left-over fabric and also out of whitework doilies. As such, about half of the white patches are also embroidered (in white), the other half are just plain.










Phew! So how to get all of this randomness into a cohesive whole? Well I made my seventeen and eighteen piles respectively, at random, and laid them out in the quilt formation, at random. And just as I had hoped, the randomness worked - there is enough difference between all of the patches that once they are laid out together it does create a whole. There were only a couple of patches that I had to swap around from pile to pile. Hoorah!

The actual arrangement of the blocks may change but I'm going to get them sewn up first. Umm, the next update may take some time ...