No Gray Walls For Me!

We’ve got building renovations going on at work and we’ve been in a construction zone for many months. My office has been pretty much unscathed with the exception of new carpet, new lights and paint.

Each office got an accent wall… bright blue, darker blue, green, yellow or gray. Guess which color I got. Of course, I got gray. Me who loves vibrant color more than anyone I know.

So I pulled out this unfinished paper pieced wall hanging that I had planned on making for my sewing room, which will now adorn my gray walls at work. I started it nearly two years ago. It’s been sitting unfinished because I needed to make seven more blocks to get it to the size I wanted. It’s made from Kaffe Fassett Collective fabrics and some batiks.

This was my first ever paper piecing project. My very generous friend Karin had me up to her place a couple of years ago to give me a lesson on how to paper piece. I learned a lot in that day that will serve me very well in my future paper piecing endeavors. She taught me how to do the actual piecing, how to use the “add a quarter” ruler, and how to manage my fabrics to be as efficient as possible.

I don’t know why, but I always dread sewing circles. But once I sit down and do it, it always works out well and the blocks go together so nicely. I have ambitions to do more circles in the future.

I played with A LOT of different layouts for this wall hanging. The small size really limited what I could do. I typically prefer a less symmetrical arrangement of New York Beauty type blocks, but there weren’t enough blocks in this wall hanging to make a nice random arrangement. It just felt too chaotic.

Here’s some of the many variations I tried. This is a good representation of my obsession with this process!

It’s really overkill. But it took a good deal of time to come up with the right arrangement. And when I would move one block to make an area feel right, it would create four other issues I’d have to deal with.

My friend Karin helped me with this process too. I’d make changes, message her a photo, she’d respond, I’d rearrange and take another photo, send her that photo, and on and on.

I got distracted and was snapped back to reality when my smoke alarm went off! I was boiling sugar water for my humming bird feeder and it boiled dry and smoked up the entire house! It’s going to take me a year to clean that pan!

I’ve been playing with some ideas for the border for this wall hanging, but haven’t yet landed on what I’m going to do. So it hangs on my design wall and I’ve been working on some smaller projects as I mull this over.  I’m thinking I’ll go simple with the border to let the blocks shine.

As I was pressing this piece, I held it up to the light and the effect of stained glass was so amazing!