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As much as I have been enjoying working on the Old Wedding Quilt I find myself hungry for color lately so I've set it aside to play a little bit. I had just enough fabric left over from Eloise's baby quilt last year to cut out seven squares. Some time ago I started playing with them, pulling coordinating fabrics, and making the squares into log cabin style blocks. Then I got frustrated because I didn't have enough pink to add strips to all the blocks, and I put it away.
In the meantime I cleaned up my sewing room and found a lot of this same pink in a bag I had never unpacked after getting home from a retreat. Oops! So the other day I started playing again. I thought the block was looking pretty good.
When I laid them out on my design wall I wasn't exactly thrilled. I don't like working with an odd number of blocks, it's hard to get a decent layout.
I found this beautiful batik in my stash and decided it would be the perfect alternate block.
But, as seems to be the norm lately when working from my stash, I didn't have quite enough. Time to play some more. Winging it not only pushes you to be creative, it ends up changing the whole look of the quilt. Now my blocks look like this.
Since I don't have enough of that cool dotted batik to use AS an alternate block I decided to use it IN an alternate block. I came up with this one.
Guess what, though? I'm pretty sure that I don't have enough of the yellow either. Aarrgghh! This batik might make a nice alternate block.
Well, that was enough color therapy for this week. (Actually, I just had other things in my life that had to be done, and that was all the TIME I had for color therapy this week!) We'll see what happens when I get a little time to play some more. This may turn into something yet.
So far, this is going much better than I had hoped. Of course, I still have a long way to go. Thinking that I would just remove enough of the blocks to make it nine blocks square, rebind it, and put on a hanging sleeve, I got started. The first thing I did was take off the outer border.
Then I started taking off the outside row of blocks which allowed me to get a closer look at the batting.
Yikes! That is some dried up , crumbly, old batting! I started picking out the quilting so I could remove the batting and made an even more interesting discovery.
I have no idea what that is, but seriously, that batting really had to go! (It makes me wonder about all those quilts I have that my grandparents made.) I turned on the TV, tuned in to some cheesy Hallmark movies that don't take a lot of concentration, and got busy with my seam ripper.
So far, I have about 20 hours invested, an old backing, and a pile of blocks and sashing, all of which are pretty fragile.
I don't think I have nine blocks with no damage so I'll have to take apart some of the worst blocks and combine the pieces to come up with enough blocks to make it nine by nine.
The next decision will be how to stabilize the blocks before I put it all back together. I don't want to lose the character of the blocks by pressing out the wrinkles that came from all those years of using and washing.
I have a few ideas, but I need to give it some serious thought. I'll probably do a little research and ask advice from my quilty friends.
I have to say that I am really having fun working on this. I knew it would be a challenge when I offered to do it, but I can already anticipate one huge benefit - a great feeling of accomplishment when it's finished.
