Back in, oooh, June last year, I joined a little quilt along. Within a week it had a couple of hundred members, and by Christmas I think it had passed the 1,000 mark. I think it must be one of the biggest quilt alongs running in internetland right now.
Of course, I don't for a minute think that there are 1,144 other people powering their way towards finishing a Farmer's Wife sampler quilt, but there are plenty of members with a good chunk of the blocks done and not too many left to piece.
I really enjoyed making the blocks I managed in the first month or two of the quilt along - I think I have a whopping 13 or 14 complete, out of a potential 145 required to make a kingsize quilt. So a little way to go then.
In a determined effort to pull out all my WIPs (I'll update you on how many there are when I can actually bear to count them) and get them either finished, donated or ripped up as appropriate, I looked through these blocks and tried to decide whether I really want to commit to making another 130-odd of them.
And the thing is, I think I probably do.
And the other thing is, I've gone off the colour combination I chose.
Sorry about that. I'm a bit fickle.
As soon as I saw the rainbow Dear Jane quilt layout pop up in my Google Reader the other day, I realised that I definitely didn't want to continue with my Farmer's Wife in it's current format. I'm not sure if I want to emulate the rainbow layout of the Dear Jane, but I definitely want to do something different to my current blocks. Incidentally, if you're really struck by the Dear Jane, there's a BOM available.
I also want to throw in a few different blocks, rather than slavishly following the patterns in the book, which I was previously determined to do. I'm thinking I might accidentally purchase one or two quilt block books when I go the Festival of Quilts in August.
But before I get all intrepid and start thinking about alternative block designs, I need to chose what the heck colour scheme I'm going to do my blocks in. The current shortlist includes (but is not limited to, if I think of a better option):
- A rainbow layout, similar to the Dear Jane or extending from top to bottom. However, I have a rainbow hexagon quilt in progress, and I'm not sure I need to crazy rainbow coloured quilts in my life. But I suspect it would look amazing when finished, and would allow me to use plenty of my scraps instead of just those in particular colours.
- A quilt with some kind of volume changes, going from pale to bright and back again, probably fading out from the centre then darkening again towards the edges. This would mean being able to reuse a couple of my blocks, because precise colours wouldn't matter as much as volume
- A monochrome quilt, either grey or yellow (or red. Or blue. No idea really) and a pale solid of some description
- A completely random scrappy quilt, like this, this or this. I love all of those quilts/blocks and would probably love the finished object, but the idea of the process doesn't excite me as much as some of the other ideas. It would be an awful lot easier to pick up as and when I felt lik it though, if I wasn't worrying about volume/shade/layout/block placement every time I started a new block. I think this would probably make the best end project, and I'd probably get into it over time, but it doesn't exactly thrill me as a starting point.
- Finding a new colour scheme that I like more than the original grey/yellow/white one. Suggestions welcome.
- some other idea that I haven't thought of yet.
Or possibly the fact that I can't think of the perfect solution means that I should abandon the farm for a while and come back to it when I'm feeling a little more inspired. I think part of the problem is that I don't feel I can commit to the Farmer's Wife until I've borken the back of my huge WIP backlog, so I'm struggling to think clearly about it.
Help! What should I do? I leave it in your capable hands...
