Stalled

The COVID caught me last week and it's taken me until yesterday to feel well enough to be in public again. But my down time wasn't unproductive time. I cleared several hundred emails from my various mailboxes, something I kept putting off for a time I was under the weather and recliner-bound anyway. I also was able, after the first 3 days, to summon the interest and energy to get into my studio and sew a bit.

The first thing I did was take a picture of what was hanging on the design wall, so I could look at it from a distance and make any changes deemed necessary.

Now that's a full design wall!

I redistributed the blocks in the upper right and lower left, dispersing some of that darkness and adding more contrast in the lower middle section. After that it was a simple matter of sewing the 8 rows together. They're currently draped artistically over the back of one of the chairs, waiting patiently to be ironed and sewn to each other

The next and final floral top/pattern I had in mind was this one, using my pinwheel 9-patches and the final pieces of floral scraps.

I had cut the pieces to complete most of this top before I was felled, so it was easy to use them as Leader-Enders while I sewed squares into rows for the Diamond pattern (top of post).

Small time segments of ironing and trimming added up, eventually, to enough elements to start filling the emptied design wall with a "concept of a plan".

Well, that's a hot mess. Perhaps swap out the pinwheel 9-patches with plain, using the pinwheels in the middle of the floral pieces?

An equally hot mess.

As I continued to iron and trim floral triangle squares, I decided the pinwheel 9-patches were too fiddly and time-costly to waste in a setting where they disappear. But even if all the 9-patches were of plain, garden-variety construction, it was all too busy for my tastes. The sample I pulled from the Quiltville site used fabrics that read as light/medium solids, so there was far less chaos going on. Adding more to this initial layout wasn't going to make it better, not by a long shot!

So I decided I'd finish all the ironing and trimming over the next several days and store the resulting 120 triangle squares away for a future project, TBD. I may not know what I want to do with them now, but I do know I'll forget too much (and waste far too much of Future Me's time trying to remember the whys and wherefores) to risk putting them away untrimmed.

I left the floral pieces on the wall and pulled everything else down, then went to visit my mom.

Her facility is only two miles away, yet driving those two miles has resulted in more apostrophes than one would think possible in that short amount of time. Yesterday was no exception. "Turn the florals away from the 9-patches," my brain told me, "and surround the 9-patches with the light fabric."

Clearly, a little more rearranging was going to have to happen as well, but this morning I took to the wall again and this was what I decided upon.

I'll probably go with a 6x9 setting (each 36-patch and floral diamond finishes at 9") and add borders, as I'm not sure I'd be able to find enough floral scraps now to make 40 more triangle squares (the additional amount required if I went with an 8x10 setting). I'll also use some of my plain, garden-variety 9-patches to make some of the 36-patch blocks.

I'll definitely be taking photos of things as I go, certainly before the final sew-up, as the iffy-ness of some of the "light" blocks in the 9-patches has resulted in a swastika image in the 2nd-row-right 36-patch. I couldn't see it standing close, but I sure do when the image is smaller. Don't want that to happen!