A new love...

Well, the good news is I found the right flannels in my stash to finish the top from my last post. The bad news? There really isn't any, though it continues to confound me and I'm stuck in the arranging stage. It's hanging on my mock design wall, and every time I walk by I move a couple blocks...then put them back thirty minutes later. It's "in process."

But all productivity is not lost:  in a rare fit of self-discipline, I decided to finish a WIP before flinging myself into a new(ish) project. And I'm totally in love with "Bricks"!

So in love, I can't stop taking pictures of it.

These started as jelly roll strips that finished two inches wide. Most of the rows have eleven rows of quilting. A few have ten; the rest have twelve -- much more dense than my last attempt at this, the lines ended up being between about 1/8" and 1/16" apart.  It's half the size of  "Currents" (just 32" x 27"), but took almost as long to quilt.

Rather than being bumpy, the texture is actually very slippery.

It was also an experiment of sorts -- I designed it so there weren't any matching seams from row to row, minimizing the bumps that result from four seams coming together. The photo below makes it look like it washes out from top to bottom, but that's just too much lighting from above and too little Photoshop retouching competence on my part. If the sun ever comes out again I'll try to get a better shot, but here it is in its entirety:

I used a strong black and purple non-batik pebble print for the binding, which frames it really well. Needless to say, I'm very happy with the results.

This is not easy quilting. It takes a lot of time, and a ton of thread (i.e., buy twice as much as you think you'll need or you'll end up at Joann's halfway through). And as random and freeform as it looks, you really have to be conscious throughout to keep the lines straight as well as wavy (I know, that doesn't make any sense, it's hard to explain) so they don't "lean" across the quilt. Letting that latent OCD surface helps as well.

And I'm happy to say that my OCD kicked my ADD's butt. Big time.