I Think It's Working

We've had some sunny, warm-ish days and my mood has improved. Saturday was so nice both DH and I put on our shorts and did yard work. The poor yard has been so neglected due to being "under water", so to speak. I finally got my flower seeds planted, some weeds pulled and some fertilizing done. Since Saturday the weather hasn't been quite as nice (Sunday was rain all day), but it's finally starting to mostly stay on the warm-ish side. Maybe my seeds will grow!

I managed to force myself back into the quilt studio. . . . finally! And I've been making some progress. The border for my Liberated Amish Challenge quilt has certainly been challenging my creativity! (I guess that would be the point, huh?)

Here is my sketch of my original idea for the border. My inspiration quilt has a double inner-border thing going on (see it here), but I don't really have enough fabric for that, and I thought that might not be "liberated" enough. So, I had thought maybe a double-serpentine border, but thought that would be too much too. As in, too much work!

I got my free-pieced word all done, and here is where I was starting. I've since decided that, due to the size of the word, it would look better along the side than on either end of the quilt.

Well, then I got to thinking about the serpentine border. I was really stalling, and thought "maybe that's not what the quilt wants". So, I putzed around with some other ideas, like maybe a square-in-a-square border, or flying geese, or any number of other ideas. Then I was stuck. Big-time stuck. Just frozen in place, and I couldn't make up my mind what I wanted to do. I really hate that phase in quilt-making. I seem to run into that in almost every quilt I make.

So, I talked it over with my DH. He encouraged me to just do the serpentine border. And I didn't want to. So, I called my daughter and discussed the issue with her. She's been my sounding board/design consultant for years now. I respect her "eye" for design, and she's always encouraging. She was having touble visualizing what I was talking about, so I emailed her the above picture.

She took the photo into Paint and played with it, and this is what she emailed back. (By the way, did I mention that I LOVE this technology thing? I think it's so awesome that we can do this!!)

When I saw this, it stuck me how much this looks like the Fibonacci sequence (read about it here). Very exciting! However, after playing with it a bit, I've decided that , although this is a great idea, it's not right for this quilt. It seems to over-power the quilt. However, I'm definitely keeping this in mind for another quilt.

Shade, meanwhile, was offering great moral support! Yes, my sewing desk is really messy, so just ignore it, please. Shade helped by moving some of the mess onto the floor for me.

So, after flailing around for a whole day, I finally came to the conclusion that the serpentine border actually is the right border for this quilt. Aaarrrrgggghhhhh! I wasted so much time, just spinning my wheels. But I guess it was a necessary exercise in creativity for me.

So, I finally got going on the serpentine border yesterday. I worked until 10:30 last night and I've got both side borders on now.

The quilt has grown too big for my design wall, so now it's on the design floor. (I managed to keep it free of cats long enough to snap this picture!) If you enlarge the picture, you should be able to see that there's different but similar fabrics on either side border. Now I'll be working on the top and bottom borders, trying to artfully incorporate the two fabrics into both top and bottom borders before adding the serpentine border.

So, I'm off to the quilt studio. I hope your day is creative!