Baby Steps in Boro

Being a novice quilter, and being me in researching options and methods etc. etc. etc. sometimes quite a lot before actually starting a project, I've been looking around the internet (as one does) and have come across any number of Chinese Coins/Stacked Coins quilts, lighting fairly early in my explorations on Ann's blog at Fret Not Yourself, which I like very much, not least because she's going through a bit of a phase with Chinese Coins lately (she started numbering them, I think she's up to fourteen! -- not in a row, mind).  Of course, there are any number of charming quilt patterns -- I must make this large-scale Ohio Star pattern! -- but somehow my Japanese fabrics seem to me to want the neatness and order of straight lines, and the Chinese Coins pattern gives that sense of simplicity and busy-ness at the same time that both fits the fabrics and speaks to me.  I did manage to find my original inspiration quilt, which had been pinned and re-pinned on Pinterest so many times that I thought the source would be lost to me forever, but then there it was at A Quilter's Table, the third one in the post.  I really like the gentle colors, gentle but far from dull, and the sort of regular irregularity of the stacks, chaos and order together if you will.  I am also really taken with this one, Ann's Chinese Coins V, which is more improvised than usual even for her, and I love the effect.

These led me eventually to a post at Rossie Crafts, a bit of a digression from my own planning, but an interesting one, talking about not so much the finished product -- in this case, quilts -- but how the maker gets there, which of course is the part that as a novice I am least certain about.  Something one of the commenters said struck a chord of recognition in me, that "one of the most debilitating fears I had to overcome in my students was the ideas that they are not good enough and that they are not allowed to make mistakes." It's wonderful to look at a website or blog full of finished pieces -- Hopewell, say -- but for a novice like me, faced with a stack of fabrics and a lot of decisions, and then in the making itself any number of mistakes or uncertainties, it can be not a little daunting.  Simplicity is not always easy, ironically!

This is not new to me, mind you.  I have a tendency to want things that I make to be tidy, to not look "homemade" in that derogatory sense we all know, ill-fitting, with crooked hems and wonky buttonholes -- and so I rarely show the stages of a project, be it knitting or sewing, or the failures (and we all have those, to be sure).  Certainly for those new to a craft, knowing more about the process from start to finish, from an expert or even that of someone with a similar level of experience, can give the confidence that leads to a willingness to experiment, or even just to feel more positive about the process as well as the result.

Perhaps there is a risk of being excessively meticulous about the process of making -- even if not on the level of "I cast on 114 sts, using the long-tailed method. I worked Row 1. I worked Row 2," ad infinitum -- but the very practical prompts that Rossie gives at the end of her post are often the kind of things I find myself thinking about in the planning stages of a project, and sometimes the kind of things I worry about ("What are you hating about this quilt at this stage? What do you love?"), but that I don't always talk about here.  And, you know, it can only help oneself, as well as the result itself, to be more meditative, more thoughtful as it were, throughout the various stages of a project. 

And so, with no further ado --

Not long after the previous post, I cut my fabrics, slashing each fat quarter in half up the middle, then each half into faux-random widths.  I say "faux" because I was using my relatively-new rotary cutter and quilting ruler, and so in order to have strips of even widths I did have to line up the ruler first -- and so the strips are wider or narrower mostly in 1/4" increments (!). 

I then tossed all of the strips into the air (yes, literally) to mix them up, spread out a white sheet on the living room floor, and began laying out the strips as they came to my hands, only moving them when there were two of the same fabric next to each other, and in a mild attempt at not having two horizontal joins side-by-side.  My first pass at cutting strips went through maybe two-thirds of the fat quarters, but at one point I decided that there wasn't enough of the browns and tans, and so I just blithely cut all thirty of them -- this might have been somewhat foolish, but there it is, and I realized when I had finished laying out enough of these to make a good-sized baby/toddler quilt, that I had used only just a little over half of the fabrics, so there is enough for a second, maybe larger, quilt if I add some sashing.  (This is not a bad thing at all, as I was just thinking that these fabrics would also make a very good picnic/camp quilt, with their dark but far-from-somber colors.)

I didn't actually do that much "tweaking" with this first layout -- just enough to spread the browns and tans fairly evenly around among the blues, and squinting at it now and then to make sure that it wasn't too visually heavy with a lot of dark or light strips in one spot.  I'm fairly pleased with the result, and at this rate it will turn out much bigger than I had originally planned.  I've since stacked up each column in order, with pins in the top of each stack so that I know where it goes in the sequence.  And now, the sewing!

Comments

[Toffeeapple]

Oh lordy, I don't know how you cope with all that faffing about with fabric scraps! As soon as I see a quilt, I panic because my eye doesn't see it the way the maker does. I shall look forward to seeing how you manage but don't expect too much in the way of sensibility in commenting.

I hope that your weather is much better than ours - we shall be putting the Ark together very soon!

[ceci]

Most interesting to me especially, since I am fascinated with the idea of making a bore inspired quilt. You are actually on the way, where I have just ordered materials to be waiting when I get home from an out of town trip.

Please keep the inspiration coming!

ceci

[Wendy]

Very lovely. Haven't heard of this quilt concept. I'm still at 9 patch squares. Hey, be sure to watch "The Terror," I think it would be up your alley!