I feel bad, because I've been here for three full days already, what could almost be termed a week in some eyes (since I left on Monday and tomorrow's Friday), and I haven't updated my diligent readers yet. I have,however, been keeping up with my design mission, and to that end I have both a short description of how I've spent the past couple days, as well as sketches and cutting instructions for my first block. Be forewarned, it's not the simplest thing I could have designed; I cut everything out last night and the darn thing has almost 100 pieces in it, and is intended to finish at 16” square. But we'll get to that when we get to that.
I arrived at London Gatwick airport at 7am Tuesday morning, just barely short of exhausted. Luckily for me (or at least, that's one way to think about it) my room at the B&B at which I was going to spend Tuesday night wasn't ready yet, so I left my luggage with them and hiked off to the train station to spend the day in London. I say luckily, because had that room been ready, I probably would have spent the day sleeping instead of being productive. Thanks to the heads up from various sources, I knew that the Victoria and Albert (V&A) museum had a special exhibit on the history of quilts and quilting in Britain, so that's where I headed. I would say the exhibit was so-so, though a few of the quilts were incredible. I probably would have enjoyed it more if it hadn't have been so crowded. One practically had to elbow to the front of the crowd to see anything, which was difficult to stomach since the vast majority of the crowd were grandmotherly types.
After having my fill of the quilt exhibit, I moved on to looking at the V&A permanent exhibits, which lasted a very short period of time before I realized that there was too much to move through methodically, especially in my sleep-deprived state. Fortunately, there were free introductory tours every hour or so, which hit just the highlights of a handful of the galleries. As part of this tour, we visited the Nehru Gallery of Indian art and saw these incredible screens carved out of marble and sandstone:
I could probably spend weeks playing with designs from just one or two of these screens, but weeks to linger on one thing I just do not have right now. Thus I picked one particular screen (second picture, the one on the left) and sketched out this design:
I've considered a couple other options, either cutting it down because the block either finishes at 16” square or requires a million doll-sized pieces to piece at 8” square, or shrinking it just a little bit. The issue with the former is that I don't think I would like how many blocks would go together (the secondary patterns formed would be weird), and the issue with the latter is that it would come out to an awkward 14” square. Not that 16” isn't awkward enough, but it is less so than 14”.
What I really like about this block is that I think you could do some really cool things with optical illusions, especially if you picked your colors right. It may involve putting the block together differently than I've written the directions so far, but if you put several of these together you would get a lattice of yellow crosses on top of red rings, but I think you could alter the intersection points to make it look like the lattice of yellow crosses was entwined with the yellow rings. There's a quick copy sort of place a couple doors down from where I'm staying right now and I was thinking of sketching out 9 or 12 of these blocks together, then having them make copies so I could play with my colored pencils and see how that works out. I'll share if I come up with anything particularly good.
Now, if I haven't lost you by now, I'm going to give you the cutting instructions for this block, as I've come up with them. Keep in mind that I haven't finished my version yet, so you might want to hold off cutting anything up until I make sure I didn't make any major errors.
Out of the black:
4 3.5” squares
8 2.5”x3.5” rectangles
4 2.5” squares
68 1.5” squares**
** I cut 34 2” squares and I'm cutting them in half diagonally in order to conserve fabric (I've got to last 7 weeks with what I brought) but it's highly annoying, and I wouldn't recommend it, especially if you're sewing with a machine. I'm having to piece the corners the old-fashioned way, drawing a seam line on the wrong side of both pieces, then looking at both sides of the fabric to make sure I'm putting the seam in the right place.
Out of the red:
12 2.5” squares
8 2.5”x3.5” rectangles
Out of the yellow:
1 2.5” square
4 2.5”x7.5” rectangles
I'm hoping to update tomorrow with the steps to make this block and my exploits from today, so stay tuned for how things turn out!
PS – feedback would be lovely, as I hope to fine tune this format. What did you like about it, what didn't you like? Should there be more on the travelogue side, or more on the quilting side?
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