Making Progress

Hello again Lovely Internet People!  Mother had an awesome weekend and she is starting off the new week feeling mighty fine.  Well, other than all the freakin aches and pains, but those are normal, I usually just ignore those.  

 

I made some significant progress on the "Monumental" basket project and actually started laying out pieces on the background fabric to arrange them.  The end result is not going to look very much like the picture I drew I am afraid.  Because of the fact that I traced around templates to place the flowers in the drawing, the ones in the drawing are all much larger than the actual flowers I am placing.  And I have decided to move the bottoms of most of the branches away from where I had originally placed them, the tops will end up in pretty much the same places but the angles of the branches will change.

I had just laid everything out on my bed yesterday morning to start putting it together and the phone rang.  My eldest son, who had told me the last time we talked that they would not be coming down to visit this weekend, was calling to say they were on their way!  "On your way where?"  Was my first thought.  Once I realized he meant they were coming here, my second thought was, "damn, I have to clean the fucking house today after all."  I told him I wasn't going to do it, they would just have to deal with the fact that my house was a mess.  He grew up with me, he should be used to it.  But as soon as I hung up the phone, my husband and I were cleaning.  So, now we have a clean house again, and we had a very nice visit with the #1 son and our future daughter-in-law. 

Oh, I almost forgot, I did figure out how to transfer the major placement lines for the design from the picture to the fabric.  It was warm enough outside yesterday for me to open the front door and tape them up on the glass of the storm door.  I only transferred the lines for the basket, its handle, and the tops of the branches where they pass over or under the handle because that is all I really want to be stuck with from the original design.  

Last night I came up with a plan to fill the basket handle with a length of clothesline, I think it is going to look really cool.  I changed my mind about discharging the basket fabric, but I am going to pad the basket more than the rest of the quilt so it will have some dimension to it.  And the trim on the basket will be padded even more, possibly around the clothesline, I haven't decide yet.  (The technique is called Trapunto if anyone is interested.)  I did cut out a basket and the batting for it, but it is just a little too small so I will probably end up starting over on that.  Shit.  I just realized that if I cord the handle it will fuck up the branches that were going to be on top of it, unless they leave the quilt entirely.  I will have to do some more thinking on that to figure out how I want to deal with those.

I will work on pressing out branches and re-cutting and placing the basket today, and maybe I will take some pictures to share with all of you tomorrow.  It still takes a bit of imagination to "see" how parts of it will work, but I think it will be mostly understandable.  I think it is looking fuckin awesome, but I may be a little tiny bit prejudiced.

Until next time ...