Piecing, Peacing

Today I'll do a bit of collaging, the old-fashioned kind with paper.  More on that in a later post.  I've been thinking about collaging of all sorts, more specifically with cloth.

Last night, I was feeling extremely tired at 5 p.m.  If it had been 7 p.m., I might have given up and just gone to bed.  But going to bed at 5 p.m. seems a bad precedent, unless I was sick or had some other reason for giving up on staying awake. 

I thought about sketching, which is often what I do when I'm sleepy too early.  But last night, I decided to go to the car to get my piecing basket.  

I was grateful to my week-end self who organized cloth between my piecing basket and the larger bag of cloth.  That made it easy to decide to do some piecing before calling it a day.  My spouse cued up The Chosen, and we watched a few episodes.  I managed to stay awake until 8:30.  I made progress on squares that begin life looking like a variation of these:

I have a vision for the finished quilt which will be made by squares that are mostly following a log cabin pattern.  I thought I would put some sort of sashing between them all, which would serve as a border and help people see the uniqueness of each square.

But while I was at quilt camp, we put the squares together, and we all agreed that it was a more compelling vision.  What fun!

It's inspired me to pick up this project again.  I had stopped for a variety of reasons; as I created the squares, I had begun to dread how I would have to figure out how to get the squares more similar in dimension.  Now I won't have to do that as much.

I still have a fair amount of smaller squares, works in progress that I need to complete for this quilt.  I don't want to be left with extras.

I love hand sewing these squares:  it's meditative and inspiring at the same time.  This piecing restores my peace of mind.