Flipping, Switching and MacGyvering

It's been a couple of days since I did any quilting. On Wednesday I went shopping after work, and by the time I got home, read my emails and took a shower, I didn't have enough brains to work on the project. The next part of the quilt is mentally intense, and I just didn't have it in me.

Last night I got home late as usual, after orchestra rehearsal. After reading my emails, I laid on the couch "just for a while, then I'll get up and work on the quilt." Next thing I knew I woke up at 2:00 in the morning. I went to bed.

This morning I played with the quilt layout. I flipped around a couple of sections and switched a couple of others. When I was finished it looked like this:


Even after the switching and flipping, there were a couple of areas that seemed dull and needed some black (top row and next to bottom row). One option was to take apart the strips, perhaps remove stripes and insert black pieces. The problem was that the pieces are angled, and I was afraid that inserting a similar angled piece might throw off the straightness of the row. Also, I just didn't want to do all that work.

So I took a MacGyver approach, and sort of appliqued black pieces onto the strip. One edge of the black looks normal, but the other edge is topstitched. Don't tell the quilt police! In the top row, the new piece is a little bigger than the original gray. You can find it just above the second row star. In the next to bottom row, I straddled two pieces; now there are three stripes instead of two. The new piece is just above the bottom row star.

I like the balance of background colors now. I don't think I'll do any more work today. I'm headed out of town to Sacramento to see a Yanni concert. I have a couple of other places on my agenda, as well, including a really big Joann's in Elk Grove that a friend told me about. I'll get home really late tonight, so I probably won't sew until tomorrow.