I have spiralled enough!

How are your spiral quilts going?

Since this theme was announced, I feel as if I see spirals everywhere! Plants, animals, cave painting, mathematical formulas...I shouldn't be surprised if spirals were the most common shape (if you can call a spiral a shape?) in both the natural world and the evolution of human artistry. I could very easily have spent three months taking inspiration and pondering what to make and never got started at all.

So, mindful of our post about procrastination and knowing that I might well be short of time this quarter, I decided to go with my first idea, which I thought would be quite quick and simple and will also be a memory of my birthday present from my daughters (which I didn't get around to blogging about). Without giving too much away it involves an old table cloth and a baravelle spiral. I did procrastinate about this for about a month because I learned the technique from a book -  Simply Amazing Spiral Quilts - and I have used it to make mini quilts twice before.

April 2012

July 2012 for a swap.

This made me worry that it wouldn't be original and it wouldn't be an art quilt as I didn't invent the spiral or the technique...But I reminded myself the group requirement is a finished quilt posted by the deadline - not an incredible masterpiece - and, as it turned out, it was not so quick and simple as I thought. With the mini quilts, I used regular polygons and paper pieced onto baking parchment. With this one, I used an irregular polygon and I found out just before I started sewing that a certain thing (I can't say what without giving away the subject of my quilt) had to spiral the opposite way to the way I had anticipated so I had to have one spiral going one way and six the other. This would have been a good design choice if it had been a design choice but it caused me a surprising amount of confusion and I ended up having to redraft the whole thing in mirror image on the back of the cloth and write the numbers in each triangle before I could bring myself to risk sewing on it.

Then I started sewing and found that, despite much spray starch, I was actually using my pieceing to stabilise the tablecloth I had chosen as foundation, which wasn't really ideal. Also, using my iron in my sewing room blows all the fuses in the house so I had to sew one line go to the laundry room (where we seem to have better wiring) press one piece, go back to the sewing room. Thankfully, after the first couple of rounds I started to be able to see which colours to put where.

And now I have spiralled enough and I just have to quilt and embellish.

Hopefully, I'll get that done next week and I won't have my usual last minute panic to finish this time.

Happy sewing and Good Luck with getting your quilts finished in time to relax before the deadline.

I can't wait to see everyone's reveals on August 1st :)