I spent most of the last week deep in the creativity zone, trying to solve the problem with the background for the Elemental Changes quilt. I feel like I must be on Plan Z by now, though it’s really not quite that bad, I suppose. If you recall, I’d decided that the pale green and white palette wasn’t going to work, and I thought it needed more color, lots more color. I spent an entire day fleshing out the the fabric choices, starting with the Bali fabrics that I’d used for the Inchies themselves, and adding fabrics in between them to expand the palette. Here’s Plan B on the table:

Of particular note is how many of the original background fabrics made it into Plan B’s color palette: absolutely none. Not. Even. One. Validation in it’s purest, simplest form. The first background fabric choices were obviously not even close to right if none of them made the cut for this second plan. Despite the validation though, the plan fizzled after I put some of the parts up on the design wall. While playing with all the colors was satisfying, I couldn’t figure out if it would all work as I wanted it to, and it was going to be a huge amount of work and fabric to get it all up on the design wall just to see if it would work out. The more parts I put up, the less I liked the result anyway.

The good part about Plan B: I laid hands on every single piece of fabric that I have in the studio, except the scraps*. Really, every single one, right down to the fat quarters. I’ve got some really awesome fabrics in my collection, I must say. Of course, now that I’ve pulled out hundreds of them and decided Plan B’s not working, I have to put them all back. *sigh*

*I didn’t go through the scraps, because the huge tub that my scraps are in has been missing since the move. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s kind of bugging me that this giant Rubbermaid tub is nowhere to be found. How could a giant Rubbermaid tub be hard to find?

I thought about many other directions at that point, including starting completely over with a more limited palette to begin with, or even scrapping the entire plan altogether and using the Inchies for something else. I wasn’t sure if I’d have time to finish the project before the deadline if I started over, so that was going to be a last resort, but every day that goes by without a decision or some progress is one day closer to that deadline anyway. In the midst of all this, I started to wonder why I do this to myself, but that’s another whole rant by itself.

Along about Thursday, I think, I decided to look at Beyond Charm Quilts: The Ultimate Challenge, a great book from the mid-90’s. The Ultimate Challenge was to start with a charm pack of squares of many different fabrics, and make as many charm quilts as you could from the original set of squares. Each quilt must have an identical piece of every one of the original fabrics in it.

I’ve always wanted to do this challenge, but just never gotten around to it. The point is, the authors started with a charm pack of 100 Jinny Beyer Palette fabrics, which span the colors of the rainbow and are widely varied in value just like the Inchies for this project. I perused the Gallery in this book with an eye toward identifying the unifying element in each quilt. How did they turn this rainbow of hues into a cohesive whole?

I discovered that many of the quilts, perhaps even the majority, used shades of grey, black, cream or white in the background. Okay, fine. Fine. It’s not what I had planned at all but having nothing to lose at that point, I gave it a go. I pulled out some black, grey and white fabrics and slapped it up on the wall, and came up with this:

It’s still missing some background pieces, but you get the idea. I think I like it and it will work, and I’ve ordered some other fabric to use in the setting spaces and border, so hopefully it will show up double quick and be the right color when it does. It’s much better than it was, in any case. I’m off to make more Inchies; I have about half of them done now!

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I’m beginning to get past some of the confusion and uncertainty of direction on my current project, which I’ve dubbed Epic Insanity Elemental Changes as a working title. I settled down to really play with some of the fabrics I sorted the other day, and I have these to show for it the last few days (click for a bigger pic):

I really love making Inchies! I’m afraid I’ve become completely addicted to these lilliputian works of art, which is a very good thing, since my big plan for this project calls for no less than 510 of the little suckers. And this project comes with a show deadline attached too: October 1, 2008! 16 down, 494 to go!

Needless to say, there will be Inchies on the brain and in the blog for some time to come. I’ve been digging through tubs and boxes of embellishments that I’ve stashed away over the years, and cruising the Arts & Crafts shop for anything new, unusual, and usable in such a small scale. Three of my favorite finds: Artistic Wire colored copper wire, Robin’s Nest Dew Drops, and Hoffmann Originals Bead Gravy.

The wire is great (as any of you who do scrapbooking surely know already), because it’s easy to shape into swirls, zig-zags, hearts, even a treble clef! The treble clef was ITMan’s idea, believe it or not!

The Dew Drops were also a scrapbooking department find, and I love them as well. These little flat-backed, domed plastic bits are appropriately named, and are the perfect size for Inchies. I do still have to hunt up a more effective glue to affix them, something that will permanently adhere them to the fabric, but dries clear so the fabric can still show through the Dew Drops.

Bead Gravy comes in small packages of many assorted glass beads in coordinating colors, so you get a lot of variety without breaking the bank. I’ve been filling in the color gaps in my bead stash with these little packs of seed beads, bugles and small cubes that are the perfect size for Inchies.

I have 20 more Inchies in similar colors to the ones above sitting on the table ready to embellish, so I’ll be spending the day on them while the kids have some Dad time! If you know of an adhesive that might fit the bill for the Dew Drops, “dew” let me know! Happy Quilting on this lovely Sunday!

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The carefully chosen palette for my next current project has been sitting there on the cutting table since I took a picture of it to share, over a week ago (it has now entered “current” project status, as you’ll see). It’s not that I don’t want to work on it, I do, other things keep getting in the way, including my own “quilt design block.”

Short “house” update: the heating/hot water system is working about as well as it’s probably ever going to work, after the plumber’s visit last Friday during which he finally figured out that a 5″ section of copper pipe was almost completely blocked by water deposits and cleaned it out. He’s coming back though, with the owner and a service person from Vaillant, the manufacturer, to replace the section of pipe, and figure out why else it’s not performing up to par. And of course, it’s a bit hard to tell if it’s going to heat the house to my satisfaction in winter anyway, since it’s the end of April and it’s not exactly cold here right now.

Other than that, there are various other things, some small, some not, that the owners need to take care of for us before they take off for Canada in mid-May. I’m still making weekly trips to the hardware store for this and that, and yet another trip to Ikea is probably on the schedule for this weekend. I did get a really great office chair for a lot less than I expected to spend there last weekend, so that was an unexpected pleasure.

Back to this project on my cutting table. I’ve been thinking about working on it more than actually working on it, and part of the reason for the delay before actually setting rotary cutter to fabric has been due to a niggling little feeling that something’s not quite right. I did make templates for a couple of pieces, and actually traced one of them onto the border print, but I wasn’t keen on taking that next step, so I kept turning my mind to other things. I finally decided that the lovely border print was the big problem and had to go, because it’s just not fitting in with my (admittedly slightly foggy) vision of the finished product.

After that flash of insight late last night, I was determined to progress today in the studio, and I had all day to do it in since I had nowhere to go. I spent all morning drawing trying to draw appliqué designs for the spaces that I’d planned to use the border print for, only to be soundly defeated by fusible web by early afternoon. I HATE that stuff! I don’t know why I ever bother with it, truly. I didn’t even get past peeling the paper off of it after fusing it to the appliqué piece. I could only get some of the paper off, and the rest stuck terribly and never would come away. Into the trash bin it went.

Still determined to get something done today, I started cutting, and threw eight pieces up on the wall. I looked at it and lost my nerve, or whatever it was I had left at that point. Maybe I just didn’t know what to cut and place next color-wise. I decided to break into the Hoffman Watercolor Wraps that I bought for this project before the move, and play with the colors, since the embellishments that will go on the quilt will be made of these fabrics. This is how I spent a very happy hour or so in the late afternoon:

There were 160 different bali fabrics in the eight tubes that I bought, and I sorted and played and pared down until I had 128 left. I thought maybe I’d have a better direction in mind if I could visualize more of the whole thing, or at least more of the whole color scheme. The row on the left is winter/spring and/or air/water colors and the row on the right is summer/fall and/or fire/earth colors. I hope. I think it helped the whole design process a bit though I’m not entirely positive, but I do feel better now. It’s possible that I feel better because I played with all these fabrics and colors though, and not necessarily because I’ve made any great design decisions!

The appliqué patterns I spent the morning agonizing over may become quilting designs, though I’ll hit the Arts & Crafts shop tomorrow for a different kind of fusible web and perhaps torture myself some more at a later date if the design really needs the appliqué. Hopefully life will allow me a bit of studio time tomorrow to see if my color play today opened the floodgates to design heaven. At least it’s officially a “current” project now, since I have cut into the fabric.

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