stillclock

as a test for a commission later in the month i decided to make one of jackie robinson's quilt patterns from her 1995 book "quilts in the tradition of frank lloyd wright."

i also thought it would help me improve my piecing and cutting accuracy by demanding a kind of precision i haven't attempted before. my cuts and seams are much better than i can usually expect from myself, but the pattern is wholly unforgiving. i knew that going in, but right now that's not helping.

the patterns are complicated. i have already learned that switching out the plain background for a complimentary directional print meant that i should absolutely NOT have precut. i should have cut as i needed pieces.

there is probably a quilt brain savvier than mine that could sort out how to strip, chain or construct the blocks or elements in a more efficient way, but i thought i should follow each step as closely as possible on my first run so... the piecing is slow, tedious and awkward. following her rule that one must always press toward the coloured pieces means you are pressing over bulky seams a lot of the time.

element lengths are not given, and using fat quarters instead of full width fabric has resulted in a truly staggering amount of waste for angled cuts, though i will reuse the pieces elsewhere. this is another thing someone with more experience would probably have recognized, but is not noted anywhere in the directions.

the quilt won't be perfect, but it will be far more accurate than some of my other work, and hopefully i will carry over the lessons learned from it. but right now i kind of hate the whole project.

aileen