I poked away at this a little bit off and on all weekend in between working on my paper. (Makes a nice change of pace.) The only thing that actually took any time was choosing my fabrics as I was trying to pay attention to which ones looked good next to each other, balancing color and design across the block, etc. Once I got everything cut and ready to go, the piecing was super-fast.
The picture doesn't do justice to the fabrics, of course. You really oughta see it in person. The cool thing to me is that this is a very international block:
- The solids are, for the most part, cross-wovens from Indonesia that I bought from a vendor in Houston a few years back.
- The one with the diamonds in the lower right is a cross-woven scrap that the tailor in Myanmar had given me--it's green and purple cross-woven. It's gorgeous in person.
- The textured in the upper right is also from Myanmar.
- The dark bronze solid towards the upper left is a scrap from fabric I bought in Thailand. (The camera made it go all moire-like but it's really another crosswoven of brown and gold.)
The piece of lace is not the antique lace I've been talking about in my podcast. I wanted to use something I didn't care as much about for my first try, so this is a scrap of a hand-dyed lace whose origin I don't remember--it's either lace I bought at a sewing guild rummage sale and tossed into a dye bath just to see what would happen, or it's a dyed lace from a scrap bag I got a year or so ago from an art quilter who was destashing some of her experiments. In any case...I thought the mottled color was interesting with the rest of the fabrics in this block, so I spray basted it to a background silk that I'd stabilized with lightweight woven fusible interfacing (as per Allie Aller's method). It's pretty solidly basted down but I'll still be embroidering it down to be sure. BTdubs, I have a lot of that lace, so it may well be showing up again.
The four long pieces around the outside are insurance. The block came a bit short of 8 1/2" square even though I thought my printed pattern matched Allie Aller's measurements. But that's the wonderful thing about crazy blocks--just slap some more fabric on there and call it a day! Most of those strips will be buried in the seams (it's an 8" finished block), but even if part of them shows it just becomes part of the overall design.
Can't wait to dig my embroidery needle into this puppy!
Are you doing the Crazy Quilt Slow Stitch-A-Long with me?
My first block deadline is this coming Saturday (forasmuch as we're even sticking to deadlines). I got mine done a bit early. Yay for me. Don't forget to join QFTRUcrazyquilts group on Flickr and post a pic of whatever block you're working on!