September 13, 2009

Slow progress on Shelter

I've been very busy with a large project at work for the last two months, which has made it difficult to get back to "Shelter." I am at the stage of building up the large turquoise section that will arc around the blue section. I started working with some strata that I had pieced back in February, but found that working with 42" strips on this larger section wasn't going to work--the pieces looked "straight" even with curved piecing. I finally figured out that I needed to work with shorter pieces and interlace them, as I'd done in a very early sample piece. So, I cut most of the existing strata and most of my fabric in half (scary! I left some uncut, just in case). I laid the strips out on a drying rack (photo above), and now in the shorter bits of time I have for quilting (given the big work project), I'm concentrating on creating more strata, rather than working on laying them out on the design wall--which takes more active mental work than I can muster right now. Here are some of the strata:


And here's a photo of some of the turquoise section, very roughly pinned up--enough done to show me that using the shorter strata is the way to go, but with a lot of pinning and re-pinning yet to be done to get this section working: