Monday, 5 August 2013

Design Wall Monday - Aug 5

Happy, happy day.  It's a holiday today, and I plan to spend the whole day in my sewing room.  It's been a therapy weekend, and an extra day of sewing is just what I needed.

I pulled out a couple of half-finished projects - victims of my mother's visit in June when I cleaned up my sewing room.  Time to get back on track and finish these two mystery quilts.  The first one is up on the design wall.  I stopped right at the last clue.  But now that I pull the fabric she calls for, for the borders, I don't like it at all :(

Apparently I hated it so much that I didn't even take a picture of it.  It looks like this one, except the blue was a green fabric instead.  I tried replacing it with the blue, but I really don't like the way the border fabric plays with the dark brown.  They blend too much.  I really wish the border fabric was the same as the focus fabric, but it's not and I don't have nearly enough of that left.  And since these are all batiks, finding a matching fabric at this point is pretty much a lost cause.

So I put up a few other choices.  First, I tried adding an additional border in the green, to help the outer border fabric.  I like that effect, but now I really don't like the blue in there.

Taking the blue out and replacing it with one of the light fabrics helped a lot.  I'm kind of liking this, but the brown/green/multi outer border feels a bit heavy.

So I removed the brown border, and left the green.  Getting better, but it still seems to be missing something.  I'll have to ponder this some more, so my design wall will likely look like this for a few days.

While it hangs out, I can contemplate the big empty spaces.  They seem a bit lost and lonely - like maybe they need applique added to spruce them up.  Of course, applique is not my favourite activity, but Ricky Tims did provide some inspiration and a desire to try new things.  So something might happen there.

Check out Judy's blog for more design walls today.  And leave your thoughts on borders & applique in my comments below :)




Labels: ,

5 comments:

  1. Gari in AL5 August 2013 at 08:39

    If you turned your pieced border around, would that give you an entry to a darker border? I tried to move it in my head but it just wouldn't go. ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rhonda5 August 2013 at 08:47

    I think the blue needs to be use in one of the borders further from the inner border.....hope that made sense.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Deb@asimplelifequilts5 August 2013 at 12:34

    I am not very good at choosing multiple borders... but your blocks are just gorgeous and your piecing looks amazing! Such a beautiful quilt.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Cindy Quilts5 August 2013 at 22:53

    Instead of multiple outer borders could you use a large outer border in the same light as the light triangles/background fabric?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Sandy6 August 2013 at 11:37

    HI there! I bet you're loving all these suggestions. Mine is, scrap the pieced border altogether, IMO it detracts from the star blocks, which are magnificent btw. Use something more subdued for a border, like a small inner border (brown? blue?) then carry out the cream to the edge. Or simply bind it in one of those colors, with no border. Sometimes less is more.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)