Tiny update

Yes, the whole ribbon thing is perfectly fine, just like I thought.

It will be hard to show it here, since I don't have the digital copy anymore and the paper one is crumply and foldy and not very photogenic, but the two tweaks I talked about this morning went pretty much as expected. I think both top & bottom ribbon parts are basically under control.

I'm still afraid to look at my fabric and start dealing with the background, though. What if I don't have the right stuff? What if it's haaaaaaaaard?

Getting the house in order

That's better.

I haven't blogged here for four years, or anywhere else for a year and a half. Blogger has evolved, monitors have gotten smaller, tastes have changed.

I still love me some purple, but that old layout with the deepdark color and links to extraneous things and a super-wide header image and everything was just not doing it for me, so I switched to a standard template and tweaked the colors just a tad. I don't know what those things on the edges are, but I'm okay with them if you are.

Procrastinating? Maybe a little. But I also wrote that whole long post this morning, and got out my materials and cleared a work space and put away the stuff that was in the way and isn't part of the process, and went on a non-quilt errand and came home and recovered from heat stroke. So sitting still for a while and playing with templates was totally justified.

I found the materials and Bob found the full-sized sketch. When I took the lid off the fabric bin and went outside to clean off the utility room grunge, Jamba stepped in to make sure nobody absconded with any bits of fabric.

Tap tap

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.

If you wait long enough, I do eventually put two and two together.

So there's this book I've had sitting out on my sewing table with the project since pretty near the beginning. It's about machine embroidery and embellishing, which is certain to be a part of this quilt.

It's called Threadplay: Mastering Machine Embroidery Techniques, and it's written by Libby Lehman.

I'm pretty sure that the idea for the ribbons (instead of bodies) came at least partly from this book, since it's been sitting right here next to (that is to say, on top of) the pattern for so long, and one of the most striking things she teaches in this book is how to make a winding ribbon pattern out of machine embroidery.

Winding ribbon pattern? Check!

Out of machine embroidery? Duhhhhhh!

It's a little boggling that I could have had the one idea without the other, but they're safely back together now. Making the ribbons out of thread stitched over the background instead of slices of fabric sewn or fused in place will do several things.

First, and best, it will let them be more ethereal, which I think is a plus.

Second, it will free us up to have a nice, dense, rich, complicated background without worrying that we are "using up" specific fabrics or, indeed, colors that we might otherwise want to save for the ribbons.

Third, the contrast issue is less likely to be a problem because the stitching can include light, medium and dark shades of thread, and can be as transparent or as dense as we want. So they should show up against anything. If I do it right ;)

Fourth, it will make the quilt much more interesting and unique because most quilters don't use this technique. It looks interesting. It makes you want to look more closely.

And there are probably a couple of other good reasons as well.

Oh, like this one: It would mean that going ahead and piecing together a lovely, luscious background would pretty much be the next step here. So, fun!

Hmmmm

I experimented a bit with an option for the background of the quilt and, to be honest, I can't decide what I think of it.

I took a piece of muslin the size of the entire quilt and dyed it with a gradation from pale to (supposedly) very dark teal. It's the lower fabric in this picture:


(The twisted fabric next to it was a different kind of experiment, and didn't really work out at all. Over 50% of the fabric remained completely white, so that'll have to be overdyed or something to make it useful.)

The gradation itself was relatively successful, in that the center is a nice light teal that darkens as it moves toward the outer edges. For some reason, though, the yellow fixed more readily than the blue in what were meant to be the very darkest parts, leaving a sort of olive/forest green (with light spots created by exposure to air) instead of the darker teal I had intended.

In a sense, it's preferable for the background not to get too dark, since we need good contrast with the foreground fabrics.

On the other hand, both the green and the light spots are a little weird and I'm tempted to redye the same piece again, using the same technique. I have enough of the same dye mixture to do that (once), so it wouldn't change the color, just the value (lightness/darkness). I would hope to keep the center as light as it is now--or nearly so--while darkening and also evening out the color in the outer areas.

Or, we can go back to the original idea of piecing together a background from a range of teal fabrics, rather than using a single whole-cloth piece.


As you can see, I also got some new fabrics for Cellist and Clarinetist. I wanted to keep the primary color scheme we had discussed, but needed to take those three basic colors in directions far, far away from the Crayola Effect.

I tweaked the lighting and contrast in this photo to bring out some of the detail, and as a result the colors of the fabrics are somewhat muted. Rest assured that, in person, the three ribbon fabrics are rich and vibrant. The background piece appears relatively close to its true colors.

Ribbons, Ribbons Everywhere

Still working on the whole ribbon thing. Here's a version where the ribbons join at both the top and the bottom, and where they retain their identities even after becoming one with the others.

Cellist has gone yellow in an effort to contrast better with the Cello, and to try out the primary color thing. I tend to see primary colors as a Crayola statement, but I understand that's less common among those who are not the mothers of young children - and it probably wouldn't look that way in fabric anyway.

Thoughts?

E Pluribus Unum

We all liked the ribbon effect in the post below, but there was a question of the ribbons making some of the figures (especially Cellist and Clarinetist) look kind of like marionettes, which is not at all the desired effect.

Following a suggestion from the Immortal Design Team, I've joined the ribbons so that all three players emerge from (and return to) a single strand.

At this point I'm paying attention primarily to the shapes, so I used a quick 'n dirty fix on the places where the ribbons cross over face & instruments - on the computer, it's much simpler to just use a semi-transparency than to pick specific, appropriate colors for each intersection, but I still wanted to show that the ribbon will be visible behind/through the other objects. I changed the color of the cello for the same reason - it was blending in with Cellist too much, and at the moment I wanted to show the contrast & the flow. The colors themselves will be addressed later.

Also, the ribbon itself will probably be multi-colored or some fourth color in the places where all three entities are merged (at the very top & the very bottom), but once again, the issue at the moment is shape more than color.

I particularly like the way the ribbons flow at the bottom; I think the top still needs work.

Oh, there it is!

When I updated the outline graphic to include the new ribbon effect and added some color, I was actually very surprised at how it looked.

I like it, but it's not at all what I pictured :)

But it gives us a starting point for deciding whether or not the ribbons are a good thing, and how they might be handled if so.

Hey, where'd all the color go?

The next step in the process is to more clearly define the individual areas that will make up the design.

We have a pretty solid color scheme, and a basic design, but where is each piece of actual fabric going to begin and end?

Will we or will we not be showing the bodies and clothing of the three figures?

We know that the violinist is wearing red, but how do we put red in that part of the quilt without actually portraying the shape of her body? And if we do portray the shape of her body, does everybody need one? It's so existential :)

In the name of the abstractness of the quilt, and also so as not to rob the focus from the instruments and the heads, which I really really like, I thought I'd try something a little more ethereal than actual human bodies.

What if there is a sinuous line--a ribbon, really--flowing through the quilt for each musician; a ribbon that flows in from the top of the quilt and through each player's head, suggesting his or her posture but not actually representing a whole body before exiting the bottom of the quilt?

It will let us put some of the reds in the area of Violinist's dress, and even permit the dress to flow along the bottom of the quilt as we had originally discussed, but it's more flowing and free-form than actually portraying her body. Same with the other two.

Another thing is that, proportionally, I believe these folks would begin to have issues if we tried to get all their bodies into the space we have available. I'm pretty sure their heads are a bit bigger than natural, and things are a bit close-in. It looks good this way, but start trying to fit in six arms and legs, several shoulders, perhaps even a chair...things could get crowded.

The ribbon idea gives us a lot of freedom; they can flow in front of or behind--or through--the instruments, the heads and the other ribbons. The colors can mingle where they cross, or not. And they also help break up some of the large areas that would be really boring if they were made out of a single fabric - even a beautiful one :)

Here's an idea of how it might go:

Color!

After all that work on the design, I realized I was beginning to picture the quilt as having a white background - which I'm quite certain is not, in fact, going to be the case.

So I decided to lay out some fabrics right on top of the full-size paper pattern to begin getting a feel for the dark, rich, vibrant coloring it's really going to have.

Since I'm not cutting anything yet, the shapes themselves are only very rough approximations - it's hard to fold an entire pair of silk capri pants (why yes, I did raid the thrift store for special fabrics!) into a 9-inch circle, for instance.

So the curves are only very rough approximations of themselves, and at this point I can't show a single fabric in more than one place - so there are no hands, and no re-use of anything for shading purposes.

But it still gives a much better idea of what we're working toward.

There are still lots of things to work out - like not enough contrast between the clarinet and the fabric behind it, and like not enough potential for contrast where the swirls are going to go in the lower right corner. But this is a nice starting point.



Also?

Check. This. Out.

I'm willing to discuss or modify almost any part of this project, but the cello will be made out of the fabric below. It's a forest green satin with black velvet vines growing up from the bottom. Unbelievable.