Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder!
I just love surfing the boards, ya'll make some really beautiful stuff and I love to see it. So, thanks for sharing all that ya do.
I bought a Jelly Roll a few years ago that I just fell in love with. It was back when Wal-Mart carried the 42 strip Jelly Rolls, at a really cheap price. Now the price went up and the rolls are only 20 strips. :-( So, I no longer buy any of them. Anyways, I loved this one as it had an Asian feel to it that my son just loves. So, I set out to make a braid quilt for him. Well, after making the first braid I hated it! Absolutely hated everything about it, the colors didn't play nicely, it was way to busy, etc,.. I ended up shelving it after making a few adjustments to it. I still couldn't bring myself to work on it no matter what I did. It was just... Blech!
This year I am working hard on finishing all current UFOs & WIPs, so far I have completed 4 of them. Yay! But this one was next in the line. I put it on the design wall and just let it sit. For days that turned into weeks. Finally, I decided to just get it done. What could I do to break up the busy-ness and make it play nicer? I worked the rest of the braids and wrote down any ideas that hit me. Once I got all the braids made, I started adding fabric and moving stuff around. ya know how we do when we are not liking the direction something is going, right? Well, this is the end result:
The first pic is the finished product, yes it actually does lay flat but my front room is too small to show that. Also, my camera is really crappy so the colors are not true. While it is still busy, I feel it's more contained than just putting the braids side by side.
The 2nd pic is the backing I made for it. I used a big print I will never use in anything and the red from the front made it wide enough to back the top. It is hard to tell but the red is a marbled red and is just fabulous! I hate to see the end of that cut.
The last pic shows the border fabric better. It is paisleys edged with a golden tan on a flat black background. All the colors in the quilt. I just quilted wavy diagonal lines across each rectangle and loop-de-loos on the border. Nothing on the red so it would stand out a bit. Moving here from a small town has sure been a real shock to me and everything I know. When making the label for this one, I just couldn't get past how it reminds me of OKC rush hour traffic! Organized chaos that makes you realize that just when you think it's gonna flow one way something changes and it goes a whole other way. So, this one is called "Big City~Slipstream" in honor of the chaos one meets on the roads here.
This quilt is still not to my liking but, recently my mom stopped over and fell in love with it while it was on the design wall. She just loved the reds and blacks, even the polka dot ones that "really grab ya!" as she says. She has been hinting about not getting any quilts for 5 years now so, I reckon this one will make her happy on Mother's Day this year. Thanks for stopping by!