At-Home Quilting Retreat - Day 3

Cadenza Quilt in Progress

Rows of music notes in eight large sections

Black strips represent bar lines between measures

This week I'm off work while I play the piano in an orchestra for a local high school musical. Rehearsals have taken place in the evenings, and I've spent much of my non-music time working on Cadenza, a music-themed quilt. On Monday and Tuesday I created units that look something like music notes, attaching a strip of background fabric (spacer) to separate the notes. The spacers are in varying widths to create variety.

Today I took all 64 music note/spacer units, put them in a box and mixed them up.

Without looking, I drew 16 strips per row, placing them in the same order that I drew them. Above is the first row.

I used the Random Sequence Generator at Random.org to scramble numbers 3-13. I followed the results to place narrow black strips to the right of units 3-13, two or three strips per row.

Notice on the bottom row there is a black strip next to a black music note, creating a shape I don't want.

I switched the black music note with a yellow one beside it. I like that look better.

I need a black strip on the right side of the quilt.

Added another strip to the bottom row, which helped.

Now the strips on the far right of the bottom two rows seem too close together.

I removed one of the strips from the third row from the top. I like that pretty well. I've also moved a few music note units around, trying to maintain the randomness as much as possible.

 

Decided rows should be 52" finished, so there should be two sections at 26.5" unfinished. Sewed the first section - right on the money! Not every section came out like this. Most ended up too long, so I'll adjust them by removing or trimming spacers, taking a slightly wider seam, etc.

First music notes section

Once again, the music notes sections

Tomorrow rehearsals begin at 1:00 and last until 9:00. I'll have a couple of hours in the morning to sew. I'll begin making four-patch for the spaces between the music notes rows.