The colors chosen by my customer were making this quilt turn out entirely bland, blah, insipid, lackluster, and nondescript. Sooo... I cut the sashings for the quilt that I hoped would breathe new life into it. I had used ivory print on ivory for the connector blocks on which I’d embroidered the flowers’ common and Latin names, and put strips of beige on two sides to give them a three-dimensional look. (Then I sort of spoilt the 3D look by adding a narrow strip of ivory on the outside of the beige, because I trimmed those blocks half an inch too small. Bother.) (Oh, well; still looks good.)
For the sashings, I used three narrow strips
of purple, lavender, and dark green with a metallic gold leaf, and every
intersection had a square of dark purple.
The border will be a slightly wider version of the sashings, and the
binding will be dark purple. I was beginning
to like it! I only wish the pieced
flowers showed up more.
Moral of the story: Don’t
use blah beige to contrast with baby pabulum.
I designed as I went along. Works great. . . . . . *sometimes*.
Other times, it works more like this:
Sew three seams. Take out two, redo. Sew four more seams. Take out three, redo. Sew three seams. Take out four. Oops, took out one too many. Redo, redo.
However!!! – The quilt is no longer
bland! It’s jazzing right up, brighter’n
a new penny! I laid it out on the floor
– the diagonal rows were done, except for a triangle or two top and bottom –
and became more pleased with it, the more I looked at it.
I still need to trim it and add the border,
but that will have to wait ’til tomorrow.
I am so pleased; it has brightened up magically! Those sashings are not pastel – hope my customer doesn’t mind. But I had to do something to make those blocks shine.
Let’s hope she didn’t order beige on tan and
cream on sour cream because she’s a person given to epilepsy at the sight of
too much brightness; because, if that’s the case, she’s going to have an
epileptic attack promptly upon viewing this quilt, from apoplexy if not from
epilepsy!
