Rethinking a Quilt

Last week I began work on another quilt. This week, after looking at the simple design I originally planned on, I’m thinking it best to scrap those plans and start over.

While technically I started this particular quilt nearly four years ago when I purchased the fabric, the idea then was to just have a random patchwork of eight inch squares for the top and so I had cut out quite a few squares. Simple. Boring. Years later, as I approach the project again, I thought it would look better as triangles, so I stacked alternating solids and patterns and cut them all in half diagonally. Again, keeping it simple. And again, boring.

So now I’ve got 36 blocks of two triangles each, 12 solid patterned blocks, a quarter to half yard of fabric left uncut from the various ones used, three yards of coordinating fabric for the back and a solid for the border. Currently, with only the triangle blocks sewn together by chain stitching (my new favorite thing about quilting ever) I’ve still got plenty of options out there. Part of me wishes I had more fabric choices to create buckeyes, but at the same time I think that limiting my choices is going to be the real challenge on this particular quilt.

I keep thinking I could halve the current blocks and sew those into smaller triangle blocks, but I’m not sure if that will make me happy with this project. I could turn the solid blocks into four-patches instead, but then I’m afraid the pattern will look off. Too many damn choices and too many quilt designs to think about! And so then I think my rethinking was a bad idea and try to make my original plan (well, original as in the last post I wrote about), something that to me looks like open envelopes, will work for the center of the quilt if I make an interesting border, do simple straight line quilting through the center of every other block and hand quilt a design of some sort in the remaining areas. Then again, we’ll see how involved I want to be on a project I plan on parting ways with. Of course, if I’m uninspired, I’ll probably throw it all back into a plastic bag and ignore it for another four years.