An A-HA Moment…

I wrote this very late last night and posted it on a message board I frequent; decided that I should post it here, too. 🙂

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I am SO excited I just can’t stand it.

OK.

Tonight, I decided, dammit, I’m going to work on the Rhapsody in Blue quilt so I might actually have a prayer of finishing it in time for the quilt show. So I got out my silver thread and did some more threadplay on the flying geese (triangles), and got it to a point where I’m ready to actually start quilting it (meaning: layer it with cotton batting and a backing and sew through all three layers). This is HUGE. I have been working on this stupid quilt since November 2003, off and on. So I’m THRILLED TO DEATH to have hit a milestone.

Well, before I start quilting, I want to do some faux trapunto, which means I’ll “stuff” the parts of the quilt that I want to stand out a little more. Mostly, certain aspects of the star. So I was pinning all of that together on a library table, which was making me walk all the way around the quilt and see it from different views.

Here is how I had designed it (this picture from December 2004):

What had always bugged me about that was the gaping hole my eye seemed to see in the bottom right corner. I was STRESSED about what to do there — how to fill that open space. So, as I was walking around the table, I saw the quilt upside-down. PROBLEM SOLVED.

This is the same photo rotated 180 degrees:

There is NO HOLE anymore. ANYWHERE. (You guys have to understand that the reason I don’t see a hole in the bottom LEFT corner is that I have plans for the quilting there that will be very very involved… Metallic threads, cording, etc. So it won’t be empty, even though it is now. I plan on quilting there to make the star look more like a comet — lots of trails.) I was almost in tears showing Jerry (yes, I’m a freak, I freely admit it)…

So. Now I’m energized. I know that I WILL finish this thing by Labor Day, because I am going to ride this high for as long as I can… Tomorrow I’ll start the trapunto process and Friday morning I’ll layer the quilt so it’s ready for quilting. That gives me roughly three weeks to quilt/bind/label it, which should be PLENTY of time to finish this puppy for the quilt show.

Man. I am going to have a very difficult time going to sleep. Last time I was this spazzed about this quilt was the day I started all the threadplay and realized that I could do it! Yayyyyy!

I think what it is… the eye is naturally drawn left-to-right, so strong design elements are usually most successful if they’re in the bottom right corner. Or movement should go that way, and then there’s less tension in the piece.

Well, with the original design, I had everything moving to the upper left, and it just was creating too much tension for my eye — even though there wasn’t a physical “hole” so to speak in the bottom right corner of the original design, it bothered me, because there wasn’t any visual “weight” there. I needed to resolve that tension somehow, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I had gone so far as to create an 8-pointed star overlay that I was going to create with thread, but I didn’t really like that idea — not only was it too complicated and a PITA to do, I would place this “element” all over that corner of the quilt and it wouldn’t solve that problem.

Turning the quilt upside-down, however, solved it. Because now the motion is towards the bottom right corner ANYway, so the fact that your eye is naturally drawn there is just accentuated by the flying geese seeming to MOVE there. Problem solved.

And the open space in the bottom left corner makes my plans for the quilting step that much easier to do — that open space just means that I have more room for that so it can be even grander.

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Slept VERY well last night, but I’m manic again this morning… Too bad I had plans that took me out of the house this morning while the girls were at school. I pick Alice up in 40 minutes… Wonder how much I can get done in the next 30?