Taking the Process pledge

About a week ago I took the Process pledge. This was started by Rossie and basically is a committment to include all the parts that go into making a quilt or quilted project in your blog instead of just showing the finished piece. The idea being that we can all learn from each others design processes. Often times the process ends up achieving something quite different than the original design idea. You can read more about the process pledge here.

So I took the pledge and I did show you quite a bit of the process that went into the PTS3 pillow but I couldn't quite tell you everything about that process because my swap partner still hadn't received her pillow and some of the process was a dead-giveaway. But now that she has happily received her pillow, I can say a few more words about that process and then show you the next project.

The PTS3 pillow was inspired primarily by this quilt in Ruth's inspiration mosaic. This amazing quilt was done by Jody of Because i'm me. I love how the colors in this quilt blend from one side to the other. Lately, I have been very interested in recreating the idea of color fade-in/out and fade from one color to another in my quilt projects. So when I saw this picture, I knew immediately what I wanted to do.

My mission was to create a piece of fabric that would achieve the same effect as this picture but there was one caveat. Since the final project was a pillow meaning that my size limit would be somewhere around 20 inches - I had to achieve the same quilt color fade effect in a very small area. That meant that the pieced squares would have to have a final size of around 1/2" in order to give me enough squares to produce an obvious color change. This was a bit of quilt piecing that I had never done before. The small-squares piecing approach using fusible interfacing made the entire process doable. I'm pretty sure I would never have gotten all those tiny squares to line up otherwise.

On to the next process.. Here is my current project

This the design plan for a hexagon pillow made with half inch hexagons. The idea was inspired by this photograph.

This is going to require around 400 hexies ~ my current count is around 360 so i'm getting there.

Hexie pile so far...

That's it for today - happy sewing!