I had a bunch of leftover linen I wanted to use up—mostly from making clothes: pants, shirts, jackets—and I was curious to see how it felt to make a quilt with linen rather than cotton.
I wasn’t, however, thrilled with the palette.
These are all colors I wear (obviously) but they are more muted than I usually like to work with in quilting. I pinned them up on the design wall and let them sit there to marinate for a few days.
as promised—messy process photos!
Still not really feeling it, I cut it all up and made some simple strip sets
sort of more interesting…
As I was pressing these flat, a noxious smell hit me in the face whenever the hot iron heated up the dark purple plaid fabric—it’s thrifted, and even though I washed it, obviously the perfume/body smell was still there. I attempted to remove it with BacOut but quickly decided it wasn't worth it so I ripped out those strips and was left with a bunch of blah.
I decided it needed some pop so I bought some black and coral red linen. That helped!
Nope.
No.
Maybe.
Getting there.
The red and black were helping but it still felt like a bit of a hot mess. I had a bunch of scraps left over from cutting up the strip sets so I started sewing those together…
Making this was the first time I felt actually engaged with the process.
I liked this new long strip so much I thought, “welp! maybe that’s it!” but something told me to keep going. I hadn’t gotten to YES yet.
I cut up the long strip and made it into corners for the big diamond-shaped piece, rotated and moved a bunch of the blocks around until it felt right and finally it was a yes.
Turns out this whole piece was just an exercise in sticking with something you don’t like to see if you can get to something you do like. It’s only 36 by 36 inches and it may stay that size. I still have more leftover linen (the lavender and the gold) so that can be used for the backing. And perhaps—since I like this but don’t necessarily love it—this will be a good quilt to learn to hand quilt sometime this winter.
A weird mash-up of improv and precision.