fabric swapping

fat quarters to be specific. a total of 28 fat quarters: 14 in gold and 14 in purple landed in my postbox recently as a result of a swap organized over the QuiltGuy yahoo! group I've joined up on. Now what to do?



















they say quilters sometimes throw down the gauntlet and all and create "challenges" - The quilter equivalent to a dare. Bet you can't. . .

the design process continues

Working on a quilt design toward the goal of teaching a class based on it. I keep an ever variable list of goals for the project.

1. design must have curved piecing in at least two places, a repetitive piecing task and a larger circle based inset curved piecing exercise

2. there must be some flexibility to the design so that students are free to add their own elements around or within the fixed design

3. the curved piecing can be taught either as a "pin-less" technique or as a "pins-required" technique.

4. the design contain some pictorial elements and some geometric/symmetric elements.

5. both pictorial and geometric elements read easily as such

The challenges that have arisen are due in large part to a deviation from my normal working practice of piecing pictorial images in a free-hand design process that allows the initial image study to be developed into a readable image via a flexible approach to manipulating the fabric.

The sketched image study shown in the previous post has not translated easily to fabric and thus the process has slowed as I have attempted to re-design the project to increase both the accessibility of the curved piecing technique and the readability of the image.

"Ocean Waves Revisited" is being revisited. By adding elements of my regular working process into the quilt I may actually find that I can reach the goals from above and add an additional element of design/technique and color practice that will be freed-up when the template driven repetition of the waves is transformed by some amount of free-hand, improvisational piecing. The challenge will then be translating the design into a teaching segment; ultimately perhaps an easier task than trying to get the original idea to fly.