D231: Here we go

First colour strip:

Two strips sewn up...

...then sewn together.

Some points are near-perfect in their matching.  Others, not so much.

The next step is to sew it up block by block and see if it's a more consistent system.

D229: Humans can't do random

From what I understand, it's really hard for humans to do random things, even moreso to organise things randomly. We're just inclined to create patterns and repetition, make links and meaning. And it's hard to clear your head and just...blaaah.

With these colours, I want the appearance of random. But I'm pretty sure if I actually tried to do it randomly (i.e. without planning) I'd end up with an imbalance or pattern in there somewhere. So this is me planning random.

Each pattern has been labeled A, B, C or D and I made a sequence that mixed them up fairly evenly.

A B C D  A D C B  D C B A  C D A B  A D B C  A C B D  B C D A  C A D B

My four-patch chevron 'phrase'.

It's a four-patch phrase: The chevron pattern uses four colours make one 'point' as a set. (I'm calling mine upwards points.)

And then I realised something. Colours will reveal patterns much better than letters! So I drew out what I had and realised it was horribly clustered. I redrew it twice more, using the sequence above in various ways. Then twice more using colours.

It was relatively easy to get a balanced pattern for a short 16-piece strip, but with a longer set it was hard. I instinctively want to have 'one of each' in each point to balance the patterns along the strip, and even wanted an equal number of each pattern in the top and bottom rows. (Yeah, I soooo wanted random.)

However there are only so many ways I can mix up with phrase without creating repetition across the points. I even thought of repeating the short phrase, but that's not random enough for me. The best I can do is evenly space the pattern clusters.

The bottom line of all that is I stumbled back at the starting gate*: creating 'randomness' and evenness is pretty much impossible when you've got four things in a four-part phrase. The real solution for me is to have more patterns. But we're beyond that point. Decisions must be made.

So tip of the day, folks: when planning a 'randomly-coloured' geometric quilt pattern, begin with noting the number of units in your pattern (your tile). The number of colours you want to work with should be a different number.

We have a winner!

My solution for this was to make a eight 4-square units. Each colour appears in each position twice. I shuffled them around until I was happy with the balance. And there is, in the end, a pattern. Can you spot it?

I've already sorted out the patterns in their row/colourway order to see if there's any clumping of plain colours, stripes or spots across the As, Bs, Cs and Ds. So hopefully it will balance vertically as well as horizontally.

Hopefully, when it's all sewn up, it will look like a serendipitous, carefree mess of oh-gee-I-just-threw-it-all-together-a-ha-ha.

*Hub and I agree: there must be a language somewhere that has a word for accidental self-sabotage.

D228: Slice, squash, sort

All the colours, cut into HSTs, pressed and sorted into colourway order each colourway's A, B, C & D patterns.  On a crappy old towel.

D227: Happy New Year's Day

After a shoddy and wet start to the day, it turned out pretty well.  Bub and Hub got out in the rain and I had a few moments to myself to stitch some squares together.  I even got a brownie cake done and hopefully I'll cut these puppies into half-triangle squares before the night is done.  It was very rewarding after so many days of not getting into any project work :D

D213: Chipping away amongst it all

So I made that cake last night so there was something for my folk when they visited for lunch. Too rich! Too rich! they said.  Oh well, more for us!

According to this, I'll be making quarter-square triangles (QST), not half-square triangles (HST).

I've been double checking my method for making up the QSTs.

I am planning to make up my QSTs by sewing two squares together, right sides facing, then cutting the sandwich into four triangles (squares when unfolded at the seam) by slicing corner to corner twice.  I'm hoping that what I've got will be sufficient for a cot quilt, otherwise I'll be wishing I'd discovered this HSTx8 tutorial before I began cutting:

There is also this tutorial for HSTs. I watched it with the sound off and it still made great sense, it's that good.

I also really like this tutorial, which also works without sound. Isn't video grand?



Four per square is not bad and it has meant I've clipped small portions off my scraps rather than using whole pieces.  There are some fabrics that wouldn't give me an 8" square, so all is well.  My only concern is not warping the pieces when making it up, but that's something to be careful of regardless of your grain direction.