Since I only blog when I feel like it, there have not been many new posts this year. Work has taken over my life, as I knew it would. In March of 2015 I agreed to take on a project which will take until August of 2019 to fully complete. It's a high school, essentially a 85,000 square-foot new school designed to surround parts of an existing old school.
We've been designing it for over a year now, and next week when we open bids, we will find out if we managed to design something that was less than the $28 million budget. The 2nd of June is going to be a very stressful day!
So there havebeen a lot of late nights and weekends at the office. But it feels good to have our whole office busy and productive after how depressing it got during the "great recession."
I did tear myself away from all that two spend two weeks with Nancy Crow and my workshop buddies. It was my 5th year there, and it went very well. I felt good about what I was doing and Nancy was very complementary.
Here's a shot of my piece as it looked on the presentation wall at the end of class. I've since taken it apart and reconfigured the pieces on my design wall. I futzed around with various combinations for a month or two. I've arrived at a stopping point, but it leaves gaps at the ends of the three rows, so I'm creating new parts for those areas. That's all I've done quilt-wise since March.
Here is a snapshot of the motif/configuration I used to generate this piece. It was imported to Notability on the iPad so I could sketch out seam lines. That is always the downside of improvisational motifs. Nancy tells us to try many motifs to find the ones that are both good compositions and sewable. I usually screw up on the sewable part. But I'm learning. And it is pure joy when you finally start to "get it."
These are a couple shots from my sketchbook where I was drastically elongating the configuration. This was really fun!
