Quilt design decisions

quilt squares on the floor
Originally uploaded by allisongryski

After the amount of time it took to do the first quilt layout, I really wasn't sure that I wanted to do it all over again. But the sewing will be a much bigger enterprise, so I metaphorically rolled up my sleeves and did a different layout. It's still an overall random appearance since I have 38 different fabrics, but the blocks of 16 have different "themes". I did an "animals and fruit" one, several "stripes and geometrics", lots of blue variations, some pink squares, etc. Thankfully, it turned out to be much faster to lay out this way. I took lots of pictures and now I can compare them.

Artistically Random

Theme Blocks

I've made a poll in case any of you dear readers have a preference.

Designing the Picnic Quilt

filling in randomly
Originally uploaded by allisongryski

I started laying out my quilt!

While this is very exciting, it's also a lot more work than I realised. Much of it is turning around bent over trying to figure out where to put a square (and subsequently needing to take breaks when I get dizzy). Having something look artistically random is much harder than just making something statistically random. The human eye is so darn good at spotting patterns and groupings of similar things that it kind of spoils that random appearance.

To make matters worse, once I started laying it out, I got another idea. Barbara asked me on the weekend if I was planning to do a 9-patch type of pattern and I said no, I was going for random. But once I saw all the 38 (!) different fabrics separately as opposed to in the square tower, I thought that maybe doing blocks would look nice. To match the block size of the back, I'm thinking blocks of 16 selected by common colours in the fabrics. So I plan to lay the quilt out a second time and pick the one I like better. Who me? Make my life more difficult.... Never!

Summer weekend

girl's night print
Originally uploaded by allisongryski

I hope everyone had a glorious weekend. Mine included these moments:

• read in the park with my sweetie while we munched on graham crackers (oh how I look forward to the picnic quilt which will be much more comfortable than our dollar store tablecloth)
  
• took the last bite of an ice cream cone just before the first crack of thunder
  
• cut out some more squares for my picnic quilt (crossed the 500 mark)
  
• had a nostalgic sleepover party with 4 of my girlfriends (we made pizza and chocolate gelato from scratch, played a cheesy 80s boardgame and watched a cheesy 80s movie)
  
• lainevierge gave us matching girl's night prints that she found at the Fringe bazaar (they come from Witty Workshop)
  
• made pancakes for breakfast
  
• played scrabble in the park with Barbara
  
• went to bed far too late on Saturday and consequently very early on Sunday

state of the stack of squares
Originally uploaded by allisongryski

weed patch progress

My little weed patch has made some nice progress, but oh how I wish I'd taken a "before" picture when it was overgrown with scraggly grasses, clover, and weeds. My ground covers are spreading out nicely as you can see from this animated gif that I made (and you can see that I took one of the pics before weeding it...)

TA-DA!

quilt back
Originally uploaded by allisongryski

Buttons Galore

buttons
Originally uploaded by allisongryski
There is this wonderful button shop on St-Denis. It's on the West side of the street if you go North from Mont Royal until you get there. That's how my friend Taylor and I found it when we went on Thursday. I've no idea what it's actually called but signs in the window say "boutons" and "ruban" which is precisely what they carry. Best of all, there's a big trunk FILLED with loose buttons. And you can dig through it to fill little bags. If you just scoop out a lucky-dip bag, then it's half the price (or rather, if you select buttons individually it's double the price). I got a medium bag of pick-and-choose for $4 and selected these lovelies:




You can see more pictures of my new button stash in my newly created Crafty Materials set. A rough count is about 250 buttons ... no wonder we spent more than an hour in the shop and I barely looked at anything else they had. Scooping through that trunk of buttons was as satisfying to the senses as sifting through a treasure chest of coins and jewels.

Cherries at last

cherries and more
Originally uploaded by allisongryski

I alluded to an online fabric purchase here and here. Well that's it up there. The photo doesn't capture how scrumptious the cherries are... especially the larger one with tone-on-tone dots. The blue rose, green raspberry, and pink garden twirly ones were all on sale and fell into the "might as well" category. But I'm glad I did. Everything is so pretty and it all arrived at top speed. It was shipped on Friday from The Fat Quarter Shop and arrived on Wednesday. I discovered this place through my reading of yvestown, a lovely interior-decorating type of blog. This is the first time I've bought fabric online and while I will endeavour not to make a habit of it, this was a positive experience. Normally I like to see the colours properly and feel the fabric, so online isn't ideal, but the lure of browsing fabric in my pjs is pretty tempting. On that dangerous note, especially given that I've reduced the size of my quilt, I will not be buying any further fabric for it. I announce this publicly in the hope that in the glare of public scrutiny I will actually stick to my intentions.