Simplicity is Overrated

I wonder why I find it so difficult to keep things ‘“simple”? One of my customers requested simple and minimal quilting but I ran into difficulty when I realised that the borders were full and wavy. I should have noticed sooner - the easiest and quickest thing would have been to remove and reattach the borders but I unwisely reckoned that I could keep on quilting to get them under control. The bottom border had an excess of 3 inches so I had to make a generous tuck and hide the little pleats with additional spirals. I decided that there would need to be matching quilting in the other borders and randomly filled spirals across the quilt to make it look like a planned design choice. I really liked the end result but a job that should have taken half a day took almost 2 days. 

In contrast, an automated pantograph called “Honeycvomb” looked fantastic on a very nice purple and cream snowball block quilt. It is one of those designs that looks great on all sorts of quilts and I wondered why I had not just done this with the previous one;) Since I had to post that quilt back to its owner, I decided to block Tartan Tattoo once more for good luck before sending it of to Holland in good time for the OEQC in Maastricht.

As a reward for completing 2 customer quilts, I allowed myself time to work on the Gloria Loughman workshop piece. There was a point, after 5 hours of messing about with Indian wood blocks, when I wondered whether I had gone too far. Things could only get much worse or considerably better after quilting hundreds of overlapping circles. I decided that shisha mirrors might add a little something so I was delighted when an Ebay purchase arrived within 24 hours. The crochet circles were a bit cheap and nasty but they looked fine alongside the other hot-fix mirror circles. If only I could learn how to make tiny crochet circles then I could add shisha mirrors to everything.

I spent some more time working on prototype “blocks” for one of the top-secret projects. I kept adjusting the size, shape, construction method, and combination of fabrics. It was annoying that the Kaffe Fasset stripes seemed to be the stingiest possible 25cm long-quarters and I struggled to get not-quite 10” cuts out of them. I am hoping that the other fabrics will arrive this week so I can crack on with this. 

Because I am waiting for some yarn to arrive from Bulgaria, I still have to complete my couching experiments on the Q24 before I can start on BzB and decide whether additional colour is added before or after quilting. At least the new supply of wadding has arrived so I can no longer use the excuse that I don’t have almost all of the raw materials to get going…