Week in Review 2017 - 09/08

Tips, Thoughts and Techniques:

I am fortunate to have a husband who photographs my work for this blog and my website. He tends to photograph my work with a horizontal orientation as opposed to a vertical orientation, since with our camera and light set up this gets the best even exposure. If the piece is to be displayed vertically all that is necessary is to rotate the photograph by 90 degrees. I had envisioned Experimenting with Equilaterals as having a portrait orientation, that is until I saw this morning's batch of photographs with the piece in landscape orientation. Wow! I like this so much better. Just to add to the thrills, my plans for how to quilt it is better suited to a landscape orientation. Don't you love it when everything comes together?

Experimenting with Equilaterals

Well almost everything. My hours in the studio were dramatically curtailed this week. Here is what I did manage:

1) Work on Experimenting with Equilaterals - Done!

I finished seaming and pressing the piece.

2) Finish Picking Up the Pieces #1 and #3, #4 - Not Yet.

3) Pot(s) made this week - Done

Piecing equilateral triangles together isn't as straightforward as piecing half square triangles, squares and rectangles. I got lots of practice in. I even discovered that seamed equilateral triangles have direction and it is easy to inadvertently get the piecing going in the wrong direction. Sigh! 

4) Free motion quilting practice - Not this week.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what will happen when I overlay Experimenting with Equilaterals with the quilting motifs I've been exploring with pencil and paper. So, that will be one thing I will focus on next week. If there is more time I have my list ready.

1) Work on Experimenting with Equilaterals

2) Finish Picking Up the Pieces #1 and #3, #4

3) Pot(s) made this week

4) Free motion quilting practice

I am now linking up to two blogs on Fridays. The first is Nina Marie's Off the Wall Fridays and the second is Free Motion Mavericks.

Quilting Along with Leah Day - Week 20

I'm still playing catch-up from our vacation in the Canadian Rockies. We ended the trip at the Fairmont Hotel on Lake Louise. This is an image taken by my husband from our room early in the morning before breezes and canoes disturbed the lake. Note the near perfect symmetry of the landscape.

Lake Louise

Week 20's assignment from Leah had her followers playing with potential layouts and eventually selecting one using the wonky blocks from the previous week. This proved to be much harder than I anticipated. My wonky blocks just didn't like to play well together. Some of it had to do with the broad spectrum of values in the fabrics going from fairly light to very dark. However, the fact that lines created by the piecing of the blocks were close but off had an unsettling, jarring effect. Nevertheless I preserved and discovered that symmetry helped. I also added an extra strip on two sides of the quilt (top and bottom of the horizontal quilt) in order to "finish" the border.

Wonky Top Hung Horizontally

Wonky Top Hung Vertically

I'd love your feedback. Which do you think works best, the horizontal or vertical orientation?