Design Wall Monday May 19

I have this on my wall today. I have gone back and looked at my old notes and stretch book from the Nancy Crow workshop I took 10 Years ago. I had a chance to take a week long class with Martha Cole about the creative design process. On the first day I chose to repeat an old exercise from a Nancy Crow class. 

Here is the strips on the wall before I sewed them together. 

Here it was when I finished the sewing. I first thought yes it is good. Well later in the week Martha asked me to write out what I liked and loved about some of my work. This is one that I looked at. It was a hard exercise but very very helpful. I was not to write down Negative things. Make no comment on the parts or things I did not like. I wrote things like "I like the unevenness of the top lines".  Or " I like the sets of three lines". I also wrote out statements like "I love to piece quilts" So I commented on the process of the art work I make. 

"Eat the Dessert and leave the crap sandwich behind". A little quote from one of my Dog Agility teachers. It was about talking about the good parts, what was done well or what was good and do not dwell in the bad stuff. Martha was saying the same thing all week long. I have to do this more. 

Our class was in a meeting room of the Commonwealth Stadium  and we could look out to the main field. They are doing some work to upgrade the stadium. This is were the Edmonton Eskimos foot ball team plays. Our class room was one of the best rooms I have been in. 

I have added this to Patchwork Times Design Wall Monday.

Well after looking at this more closely I folded one part of the quilt out of the way. Wow I liked that even better. The art work became stronger. So I changed it. I took out some of it. And what you see in the top photo is how it is now. I am not sure if I will repeat this in colour or not. Maybe. 

Punchy Orange Saturday

Around About - three months 

We are go to get a Pineapple Punch tonight. What? We are getting lots of moisture from Hawaii so it means Snow tonight. The bright Orange scraps make me think of the bright colours of Hawaii. Orange is the new colour for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge 2013. I have added my post to Scraphappy Saturday Orange Oasis today. After you read my post, Go see what others are doing with their orange scraps.

I sewed on my "Around About" last night. I needed to get from purple to Orange. Last month I was lucky to find an old strip set of pink and purple to make the change over. How was I going to make my change from Purple to Orange? Why would anyone have purple and orange left overs partly sewn? Well I dug and dug. Guess what I found? (it helped that I cleaned and took note of old UFO's last weekend).

Orange scraps, list of blocks I need to do and little piles of units needed. 

I found this Purple and Orange lumpy wavy strip set. It was built in a Nancy Crow class maybe back in 2004 or 2005. I have a box of curvy strip sets I built in the class. I spent at least one full day (and night) building about 12 strip sets that are very wonky and measure about 20 inches across. This was one of them. Perfect. Finally using it. 

With the strip sets I have some more curvy cut strings. Many in orange. See how wavy they are. They were cut with a rotary cutter but not a ruler.

I sewed some together. Do you see how lumpy it is. I do not iron it yet. Cut it first.

Cut before you iron. I made it wide so that after it is ironed I can straighten it up again. I am not sure I want "Around About" to be totally wonky. Just a few bits here and there.

I used best press and a very hot dry iron to make those seams behave. It worked. I then trimmed these again to get out edges to be some what straight. I did not want to get into fussy curves on the larger units I am adding.

 I have been interviewing each of the add on before I sew it on. This is the photo before I sewed and in the stage were I thought "Yes I am happy with it".