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Is this thing on? Yeah, four years later, I know.

You know they say, if you're stuck, you should just walk away from a project for a while and let your subconscious work it out, right? Or, in this case, get divorced, deal with that for a couple of years, struggle with parenting and earning a living, finally leave the desk job for at-home work and one day wake up (yesterday, while I was trying to nap) and realize you have both the time & mental energy for this sort of thing again and the time is, in fact, ripe. How about that?

As an added bonus, my Patron (hee!) is still enthusiastically interested in pursuing the project.

When I re-read all the blog posts and emails yesterday, I rediscovered the sticking points of lo these four years past. There were two of them:

• One, the awkward positioning of the ribbons where they join/split, particularly at the top.
• The other, which I had considered in my own head, but apparently not documented on the blog or by email, was how to create a background that would be bold and colorful and worthy of the design, but which would harmonize with, rather than overpowering the instruments and, especially, the ethereal ribbons.

I mean "how" as in how, physically, to create such a background. It will surely be pieced together from many different fabrics, allowing for variation in color & intensity - I had pictured a lighter center moving out toward darker edges - but what shape of pieces would allow lots of fabrics to come together without being busy and completely overpowering the actual design?

I had pictured long, wavy pieces, mirroring the ribbon effect, but then would the ribbons themselves stand out enough? I had pictured random pieces, in the crazy quilt style, but do we really want all those random angles and straight lines in such a smooth, fluid design? I had pictured some sort of diamonds-radiating-out-from-the-center pattern, but that would be extremely difficult to piece and, again, such a "hey, look at ME" kind of design in the background would compete with the design. Always back to competing with the design.

So. Four years later I come back to the thing and, I've got to say, I kind of expected to look at it and just know what to do about these two issues. This is the epitome of stepping back and focusing on something else while the back of your mind solves the problem, is it not?

Yeah, didn't happen. I simply agreed with my 2008 self that these were two issues that needed to be resolved.

But, I went ahead and contacted Patron anyway, hoping that getting the materials out and messing around with them (today's task) would prove inspirational.

Later in the evening I looked back at the design and it did occur to me that the ribbon thing should be pretty easy after all. The bottom ones, deemed somewhat too busy, can be simplified by eliminating the extra loop in Cellist's ribbon and allowing it to curve toward the bottom edge the same as the others do.

The top ones, which are a bit of a mess, may in fact come together quite nicely if I just move the junction to the left and angle it so that they're all moving off the upper left hand side, rather than the right. The blue one won't have to go through those contortions that way, and the red one should be able to make that turn much more gracefully. The yellow one was already headed that way in the first place. I'll have to try it out later on the large drawing.

(The one casualty of the four-year intermission is the digital version of the design. I still have access, obviously, to the pictures that were posted back then, but I'm not sure I can even get into the hard drive it was created on. It would take more time than it's worth to go back and recreate the file in an editable form and relearn the graphics program.)

So the ribbon thing might be okay.

What about the background? Piecing that is really kind of the next step, but where to even start?

Happily, when I woke up this morning at 5:30 and did my daily "Okay, what's today? Who needs what and when do I need to get up?" run-through, I remembered that I was to get back into the quilt project again, but didn't know where to start, and my brain suddenly went, "watercolor," and then the other side of my brain went, "Well, duh."

Watercolor, in quilting, is easy to sew but tricky to design. Physically, although it can be done with any quilt block design, it's usually just a bunch of squares sewn together. Often they are quite small, say 2" squares, but they don't have to be.

The focus is not on the construction, but the overall effect, which is of gradual color/value change over the expanse of the quilt, not on contrast between adjacent pieces, which is normally the whole point of sewing different pieces together.

Back in 2008, I worried about using traditional, straight-line piecing in a design so focused on smooth curves and movement. However, many quilters actually advocate doing just that. Provide a structured background on which to feature the organic curves of appliqué or other techniques.

I also kind of like that simple piecing is a bit of a nod to the fact that this is, in fact, a quilt, not a fabric painting or a textile sculpture or something. It roots it in the tradition and history of our chosen medium, before departing on its flight of fancy.

So. that's the thought process of the last 18 hours or so, since it occurred to me to revisit the whole thing.