The Creative Process, III

I let the quilt of the Norwegian mountain house sit for a while. I worked some on a jacket I'm knitting that will then be felted/fulled, but that deserves a post of its own. I've also been working a bit on a big project at work. And we had a state primary here last week which meant a very long day at the polls plus the day I took to recover. Finally, there's been the little matter of younger son's wrecking my car on election day. He's okay, and it was a single car accident. I'm still waiting to hear the verdict on the car; preliminary word was "borderline totaled." Yeah, that's another potential post.

Anyway, you can see the photo of the house I'm doing in fabric here. You can also see where I left off last time. Today's goal was to get the top little red part of the second story done. Last time, I did the bottom and sides, up to the top of the window unit. If I actually planned these things, I might have done this differently and ended up with something that looked a bit more realistic. But in the vein of liberated quiltmaking, I am not doing a perfect replica of the cabin, just something recognizable. Here's where I started today. The two pieces of red strips at the top will be the sides of the roof unit. The white strip will be the white roof edge. I sewed a diagonal seam and then trimmed it. If you're not a quilter, the item on the right that looks something like a pizza cutter is a rotary cutter. It's wickedly sharp but can precisely cut through multiple layers of fabric, using the ruler that's shown as a guide.

The next challenge was to get the blue sky and black roof section on each side with the lines of the roof lining up on each side. I don't have any photos because I sort of winged this. I sewed a strip of the sky to a strip of the roof and then laid the first red and white unit down in a position I thought would work. I basted the seam and checked. It looked good, so I sewed the seam tightly. Then I repeated the procedure on the other side and hoped for the best. I must have done something right, because it looked okay when I sewed the two halves together and then sewed the top to the bottom, window piece. Not bad, if I do say so myself. Of course, this shot shows how I could or should have done things differently. Note that I didn't take the white out far enough on the left side to match the right. And even if I had, I would have had to add the black roof unit by sort of insetting it, not necessarily an easy thing. The alternative? Slice off the roof edges to make the piece into a nice rectangle. Here's what it looks like sitting on top of the black batik I'm using for the roof. I'll figure out in my next session whether to extend the white trim edges and how to add the chimney to one side. Looking at it here, I'm thinking that I should extend the white edges; the trick will be matching things on each side, though if they're only off a little it might actually add to the character of the representation.

If you've been keeping track of the music I've cited in each of my other posts about this quilt, today's soundtrack was three Josh Groban CDs set on shuffle on my Mac. I'm saving raucous, more lively music for when the cabin unit is done, and I'm doing the more free-form blocks that will go around it. Depending on the status of the work project, I may do some more work on this tomorrow. Whether I'll get a report posted here would be another matter. I'm only still up tonight because I'm watching UVa play Arkansas in the College World Series. It's the bottom of the 12th inning right now, and if UVa doesn't stop squandering chances to win, I may have to abandon them. My school spirit (I went to grad school at UVa) only goes so far (and extends only to the non-marquee sports). Of course, since Arkansas just went ahead by one run, UVa, which hasn't been able to score one run in several innings, now has to score two. Oh well.