Perseverance

A heard a motivational speaker recently talk about the old standard "Success is 90% perspiration...etc." and I've certainly read and tried to heed enough variations of "Just Make Art," in the past couple years.   So... after getting good advice about my large workshop piece (I've decided to call it "Background Noise") I've decided to leave it as is, and get started on sandwiching and quilting it.   But remember these horribly ugly units?

The were so unappetizing that I never even took a picture of them separately, just cropped out of another photo.  Well, I couldn't seem to let myself just scrap them.  They haunted me.  So I decided to disassemble them and try to make something of them.  Over the past week or so I've spent all my spare time studying other artists who work with strip piecing techniques.  I've created a Pinterest board for them and have over 250 pins at this writing.  So I'm starting to understand more about the process.  I've also gone back and studied the process photos I took of classmates work to dissect how they arrived at their ideas.

Long story short, I've been playing with the pieces, deciding not to throw them out, but see what they can do.  I had to wait a bit until another yard of the Amy Butler Quilting Solids "Mango" arrived because (Orange Again) it seems to be the focus of the group.  (Thank you Quilt.home.com for the quick delivery!) Please note it is NOT as bright as it looks here.  There is a distinct contrast between the neon orange in the "filmstrips" and the large solid.  I like to see it in a photo.  In reality I could not get the yellow to merge with it's yellow neighbor, but here, it really does.  Unfortunately (or maybe not?) it seems to want to be a large piece...  Unfortunate just because it will take me forever to finish and quilt it.

Here's where I am as of last night: