Goodbye to the Grid

The Quilt University course is now nearing the end of week two and after a struggle, I have produced a design for my quilt that I'm reasonable happy with. The next step is to do some colour studies to see which shapes need to come forward, and which need to recede!

Dena Crain, the tutor is very encouraging with just the right way of criticising without getting personal. There is a lot to read and the next lesson will be up tomorrow so there's still lots to do.

So here is the design, as yet not totally finished as it doesn't have a border. It will need trimming because now that it is full size (A0), it does have a lot of empty space at the edges.

It's a pretty awful photo, but I hope it gives a flavour!

So my DH and I have been discovering the delights of getting an image scaled up and then printed out and it's taken us most of the day! He is such a treasure, because the only way we found it could be done was to select areas from the original in Paint Shop Pro and then print each one and then stick them back together with magic tape! He stuck at it and now I have my design pinned up on the design wall waiting for the next step.

Tomorrow will be a busy day because we have someone coming on Sunday to view the house and it is in a real mess. Having packed most of my fabric, dyes, paints etc ready for the move that never happened, I then partly unpacked because I needed to use some of it!  Now stuff is littering the spare room and almost every surface has clutter on it and as we know, clutter doesn't sell houses!

Lasagne for tea tonight, so I'm off to get going on it before I start picking and ruin my diet!

Another good day out

Off to Clifford on last Saturday for a meeting of our Contemporary Quilt Group. The Community Centre at Clifford is an excellent venue with plenty of tables, chairs etc, a very well equipped kitchen and very good natural light. A number of people couldn't attend, but there was a goodly number present even though it was a very cold day.

The meeting was not entirely successful. Not everyone wanted to join in with the design exercise but we did, I think more out of not wanting to say we didn't want to do it than anything else. I didn't end up with anything to show for it.  Indeed, it made me think about whether such exercises are necessary. In fact I now think that they are probably not for me. My view has been reinforced by the excellent Quilt University class I am doing. This class called "Goodbye to the grid" is based on a technique that I hadn't tried before and I'm finding it very rewarding.

The afternoon session at the meeting was a demonstration of mono printing followed by everyone having a go and although this was more enjoyable and I came away with some prints, I have to confess to being rather at a loss to know what to do with them.

So I have finally reached the conclusion, and not before time, that any actual design exercise or textile technique is only valuable for me if it is done in the context of the work I'm doing at the time. So my Quilt University class will I hope provide me with a design for a quilt for the CQ at 10 challenge. If I manage to produce a finished quilt, I may even enter it in the competition, but I'm still not convinced that I want to do that.

So here are a few of the embryonic drawings that might become something!

Watch this space!