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Mystery Quilt, Part 6:  Stack the Deck / Roll the Dice

1/7/2009

1 Comment

 
New to this series? Go to Part 1 here.
Random placement of fabric:  it's an interesting concept.

Lots of quilt patterns call for arranging fabrics randomly: all sorts of scrap quilts, charm quilts, and many other multi-fabric designs. Have you ever made one of these?  

If so, tell the truth ... how truly "random" were you? I want to know, because I'm trying to assess my level of obsession.

I simply can NOT bring myself to arrange my quilt patches randomly. Casually, yes. Randomly, never. I might start by tossing all my patches up on the design board, willy-nilly. But then I spend HOURS carefully re-arranging them, seeking some elusive perfection in balance of color, value and texture. Should I seek professional help?

This obsessive tendency really gave me fits with all those randomly-colored bias squares. There were 800 of them! OK, really only 720, after pulling out the corner triangles, then only 640 after pulling out the red ones for the center blocks. That's still a LOT of possible juxtapositions to consider.  

Sewn together into left and right-handed pairs, there are 160 pairs of each persuasion (left & right, that is). These now get combined into little 4-pair stacks of lefties and righties. That will be 2 lefties and 2 righties for each of my 20 blocks, for a total of 80 stacks.  

To be continued .....
1 Comment
Michelle link
1/16/2009 06:54:36 am

I'm pretty random. When I'm picking out little pieces to put next to each other, I'll just glance to make sure I'm not putting identical pieces next to each other. And then when I assemble the blocks into the finished quilt, I'll just lay it out on the floor and walk past it a few times to make sure that all of one fabric isn't clustered at the same end.

So I'm not truly random, but I don't put a lot of thought and concentration into it either.

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