Piecing again

A couple of weeks ago Judy Kirpich wrote a blog post that exactly summed up what's going through my mind.  She wrote:  "It's that time of year when artists who work in the quilt media start to go bonkers.  Either they have not yet finished their pieces for Quilt National, or they have finished them and are wondering if they should try and produce one more, one possible better than the last."

I have two pieces quilted, blocked, and ready for facing.  I have a third one pieced, but I'm not happy with it.  Decided to take a calculated gamble and start a new piece which I hope will be better.  Maybe it will have to be a bit smaller than my others (you know I love to work HUGE) but I think I can finish it in time.  If all else fails, I can quilt up the one I don't love so much.

I've been using my technique of fine line piecing for several years now, and my mental to-do list of approaches I haven't tried yet is getting shorter.  My first several quilts were all in solids, but more recently I've explored using print fabrics for the very narrow lines.  Twice I've used striped fabrics for both the narrow "mortar" lines and the larger "bricks."  Now I want to use prints for both bricks and mortar.

Like many people in the US this summer, I have heat on my mind, and the new quilt is all hot orange.

Some readers have asked me how I go about piecing the very complicated designs in my quilts.  It isn't at all complicated if you take it one bit at a time.

I start with strips, which I sew into strip sets.  The "brick" strips are always separated by narrow "mortar" strips.  I don't make my strip sets very long, because I don't want to be stuck with the repetition of A-B-C-D too many times.  So I might take those four strips, slice them into shorter pieces, and make one set of A-B-C-D, another of A-D-C-B, etc.

This is a lot of tedious sewing without much intellectual challenge, so I listen to trash TV or the opera and just crank out the miles.  Finally the fun part starts.  I press everything and cut the strip sets into short slices.

Then I find three or four slices that are the same length, preferably with different fabrics or different arrangements of the same fabric, and sew them together to make a little block.

After I've made a bunch of small blocks I fit them together to make larger blocks.  I hate to waste fabric (by which I mean cutting off a quarter-inch or more) so I often use a two-step technique to fit small blocks together.

I find two blocks that are about one brick width apart from each other.  I sew the end of a long strip set to the shorter block, sew the two blocks together, then trim off the long strip set to the exact length I need to match the other block.

Then I repeat these steps to make larger and larger blocks.  And repeat.  And repeat.  And repeat.  And repeat....