Playing with color

For years I've been working on a quilt. It's a crazy quilt of sorts, though maybe it's more of a sampler quilt these days. It started as a quilt for a single bed, graduated in size (theoretically) to a double bed, and if ever finished will now need to cover a king-size bed. The size isn't the only thing slowing me. I think I'm much more intrigued by the process than the finished product. That's probably a good thing, since it may never be finished.

One thing I learned early on is that just laying down a wonky piece of fabric and stitching other wonky pieces on to it doesn't work. The mass of fabric begins to buckle and warp; it doesn't lie flat. That discouraging fact led to a hiatus of several years. Then I read that crazy quilts are worked in sections, each section worked on to a foundation fabric. Aha. That worked for me, but the work went slowly.

Recently I read Gwen Marston's

Liberated String Quilts and have been using some of her techniques. My squares are not "liberated" because I'm still using a backing like I used for my other non-string squares.

The photo (bad lighting, slightly out of focus, taken in a rush before the camera went travelling without me) is of a piece recently worked using the neutral -mostly- colors of August Project Spectrum. By last count, I may need as many as 25 more squares; I want the finished, if ever, quilt to hang down over the box springs. This is an admirable, if wildly optimistic, goal.

All in all what this says is that there is something I do that I do more slowly than knitting. However, it does give me a chance to play with color, patterns, shapes. And this is liberating.