Design Wall Monday-Orca is finished

I finished the Orca Bay top yesterday! So glad all those bits and pieces are completed. I found that keeping everything oriented properly was a challenge-and there is still one that I may or may not correct. I may choose to call it a design element and leave it.  It still needs to be pressed, then it will mellow and age a while as I have another quilt to begin piecing, and, of course, many to put on the frame and quilt.

Looking at the photo, the top appears very ‘light’, the neutrals are more obvious than when I enlarge the photo, or look at the top in person. It gives a whole new perspective. I think I will plug the photo into Photoshop and play around a bit, trying some of the filters that Vicki used in her Color Theory post last week. That post has lots of good information to use when selecting fabrics.  Now that I am on that train of thought, I think I will also use it on the photo below.

This is what I hope to get started on today: Green and purple batiks need to be sliced and diced so that I can begin piecing a very graphic design, the pattern  appeared in  Fons and Porter’s magazine last spring.

Check Patchwork Times for the design walls of other quilters.

Design Wall Monday, Orca Bay progress

Obviously not the whole quilt-just the units on the wall to give me an idea of how it will look when it all comes together. When I first placed the pieces, I was dismayed that I couldn’t see the overall pattern, neither could MOTH. I took some pictures, thinking I would be ahead of the game for Design Wall Monday, and shared them with a friend. It wasn’t until I was describing the blocks to my non-quilter friend that I saw a mistake-a really big mistake! I had done the stars with the dark background (aqua) wrong, they weren’t stars at all, the way I sewed them.  Spent yesterday frogging and remaking those blocks.

Pay a visit to Patchwork Times to see what others have on their design walls.

A visitor to my sewing room

I’m still working away at my Orca Bay Mystery quilt. As I was trimming the orange string blocks, I was just dropping the scraps into a pile. It formed an amazing orange pyramid on the cutting board. Somewhere along the line, I noticed a tiny scrap moving across a strip of the aqua…what the ?????   A ladybug had decided to visit the sewing room, she blended in beautifully with my orange scraps.  I grabbed MOTH’s camera, but neither of us could remember how to use the macro function before she became tired of posing. Can you see her there on the strip?