Thursday, October 16, 2014

Fireworks: A New Project

Challenges


At this point in my quilting career, I feel like I have kept my projects pretty safe and straightforward, playing more with color than shape. The first real tricky project that I tackled was my Hopscotch quilt and we all know, that even though I won the round with the quilt top, I still have yet to do battle with the quilting :)

One project that I knew would be challenging, but caught my eye nonetheless, was another pattern by Camille Roskelley, Fireworks.

The only change I planned to make to the pattern was to make it smaller. Oddly, I have this thing against square quilts. To me, blankets should not be square, they should be rectangles. So there. I planned to make only 12 blocks so the quilt would be three blocks wide and four blocks tall.


My fabric choice also came to me right away. I wanted to use Denyse Schmidt's Chicopee collection. I had a full set of fat quarters stashed away for just the right project!



A Family Affair


I had the pleasure of traveling to Upstate New York for work. That just happens to be where my extended family is from, so I snuck in a little visit. My aunt Anna is an accomplished quilter and I knew she was just the person to help me tackle this challenge, so I made sure to pack my fat quarters and pattern in my suitcase.

My cousin and I headed over to my aunt's place and enjoyed a lovely afternoon of chit chat and sewing. At the end I had a completed quilt square! Not bad! These are by far the best flying geese I have put together and almost all the points look great. Color me pleased.

DSC08739
My first fireworks block.

Languish


As I shared in my Penny Patch post, I am not really a fan of the whole cutting part of quilting. At my aunt's, to keep things simple, I had only cut out what I needed to make the above block. On top of not wanting to tackle the amount of cutting involved in making 11 more quilt blocks containing 73 pieces each, I was struggling with my design choice. What were the best fabrics to put together in each block? Should I only use one of the color ways in the collection, or both as I had planned? Was the grey background going to make the quilt look dull? So I pondered and mulled and occasionally pulled the the fabrics out to see if I could come up with something that would make me happy.

At long last I decided that I wanted to continue to tackle this challenge. I thought the best way to get my mojo going was to make some progress. What feels like progress? More blocks! Here is my second block.


DSC08737
My second block.

Buoyed on, I finalized my fabric combinations and got all the patterned pieces cut out.

Fireworks Pieces
The rest of the color and pattern combinations

Now all I need to do is cut out all the background fabric. Not a small task. I don't want to let this one languish too much longer, but I do have a few other things on top of my list to finish before I continue this challenge. At least now I am excited to see it come together!