LizQ3 – Fun with Colour

I’m loving making this because I really have little idea what it will be like when it’s finished other than very bright and it’s great to use all of these fun fabrics I’ve been adding to my stash over the last few years and waiting for the right time to use them. This quilt has now become a bit of a challenge to use more and more bright fabrics but in a way that works well. I particularly like the border strip with the sewing notions on it – it pulls all the current elements of the design together really well, and starts to balance out those naughty shoe-fly blocks.

I had a ball last weekend playing with my collection of bright coloured fabrics from my stash. The LizQ has now developed from making a quilt for a sewing room, to being a challenge to use as many bright fabrics in one quilt as I can. How did this happen??

Displacement was discovered by accident, so were post-it notes, and I’m now adding the LizQuilt to the list of happy accidents. I started the quilt with my shoe-fly blocks (see the entry The Liz Quilt – A Random Project (LizQ1)), and when I added them to the panel blocks I created, I thought they overpowered the picture panels which wasn’t the effect I wanted, as the picture below shows.

So I kept adding borders to both balance the shoe-fly blocks and to increase the size of the quilt (it’s still not big enough to be comfy yet – but there’ll be more on what I’ll do about that in the next post or so). And this is where I’ve pieced it to so far.

While the sewing notions strip looks good (I think) it was fiddly to piece because I had to try to match the pattern. I think I’ll write some notes for the website in the next few weeks (http://sites.google.com/site/bertcollections/) to save some of the traumas with this – I spent a long time getting the first join in the pattern done, and then still wasn’t happy with the result. I pinned it to my design wall with the centre panel and thought to myself “why didn’t I just do it this way”. That had a couple of effects – the second join to me about fifteen minutes instead of an hour, and the join was so much neater that I unpicked the first one I’d done differently and re-did the whole thing. In hindsight I probably should have consulted my books and magazines first but I was on a roll and having fun so it didn’t really matter.

The LizQ is now about the standard width of a fabric so the pieces I have not big enough for the next border, so later this week I’m off to my favourite store in Canberra to get some extra bright fabric to help me complete another couple of borders for the quilt top.

So, the LizQ is proving to be lots of fun, and I hope your projects are keeping you amused too.
Bert.

PS: I’m still working on the Time for Tea Quilt (T4T) in the background as well – I’ll post an update on that once I’ve got the ideas clearer and can share them with you.