Tuesday Musing - Playing on my Design Wall

Whilst we were away travelling I did a lot of applique for a quilt I called Tea Shop Quilt. It was based on a pattern I had purchased whilst in the UK in 2013, lost, reordered on the internet (after some stuffing about) along with 2 other patterns by the same designer. They were all for different projects - a tea cosy, coasters, and wall hangings but I combined them into one quilt. I had bought a lot of different tea shop related fabric during a driving holiday Fixit Guy and I had following my return from the UK (where I had visited very few fabric shops and bought no fabric at all) In Australia in country NSW I had visited fabric shops whenever I found one. I bought fabric which related to the tea shop theme... cups, mugs, tea pots etc. It was a very eclectic mix of fabrics! In putting together the blocks to applique I had a mixture of traditional applique blocks from the patterns I had bought, and appliques of the pictures in the fabric.

I had nutted out a design in my graph paper book so as to combine a range of sizes of blocks. I cut out back ground pieces as per the design but had never put the completed blocks up on the board. I had actually run out of prepared blocks on the trip and had moved on to working on some embroidery blocks not associated with the quilt.

In sorting out my cupboard of projects with a view to listing all my projects (on of my January goals) I found the blocks and yesterday decided to lay them out on the design board to see how it looked.

This was the initial layout, as I had designed it. I had to make some more blocks up - some to be appliqued, and some cut from the teacup and cake fabric as is. I put the photo on twitter and Facebook. A friend asked why I didn't put the tea shop central.

That had been my initial design plan and I can't remember why I changed my mind. So I had a go at an alternative layout. Its not sew together yet as I have several blocks that need to be finished off first so it may well change again.