A Finish and a Restart on Off the Wall Friday

 

So I'm happy to say that the 20 Minute a Day rule is working ... mostly.  I won't say I've been perfect this month but I've gotten a lot more sewing in than I have been....baby steps!  Because of that, I can announce ... drum roll ...that Tessa's Mosaic is finally completed.  LORDY, I'm so happy to announce it!

The Facts

• 36 in by 24 in
  

• Machine applique/pieced, machine quilted

• Commercial Cotton, hand dyed cotton by the artist

• Cotton, polyester thread

• Original pieced based on a photograph taken by April Meyer Smith 

I really liked using Timna Tarr's Mosaic method and hopefully, soon I'll do another ... this time on a piece that I'm not so emotionally attached to!  

But that will have to wait since 2022 is a year to finish Works in Progress!

I took out the Rain, Rain quilt I was doing in 2020.  You remember the one ...It was originally based on a kit designed by Sue Daley's Abbie collection that I bought on eBay.   It featured little English paper pieced umbrellas that were hand appliqued and embroidered.  It was supposed to look like this:

But of course, I couldn't do just that, right?  So I started playing with color, value, and pattern and this is where I left it at the end of December 2020.  Yeah I know, it's a bit much!  I thought I was almost done and I was going to use it as a project to learn  "Quilt as you go" machine quilting on.   So this is where I left it:

Of course, I was wrong.  It was a mess!  Every time I took it back out to get the final set ... I don't know...I just didn't quite like it.  This time when I took it back out, I realized immediately what the problem was. TOO much medium value...TOO much busy.  Not enough dark, not enough quiet.  The easy answer would be a predictable nice sashing set between the columns of busy, but really, who likes predictable? So I pulled out the fabrics...again...and added more black.  As I'm working through it definitely helping.  The black all of a sudden is acting like an accent color to move the viewer's eye across the piece.   It's giving all that busy an anchor.

After my trip to Berlin, Ohio, I got the hand quilting bug.  You walk into the Helping Hands Quilt Shop on Main Street and they have quilts on frames waiting for the Amish quilters to hand quilt.  (They charge $1/yd of hand quilting thread).  So I thought Rain, Rain would give me a good excuse to get out my quilting frame.  

For a quick little project, this sure has gotten totally out of hand, right?

So What Have Been Up to Creatively?

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