Journal Notes

My inspiration is what I believe to be an AI painting I saw on Pinterest. It’s for a diamond painting kit sold on Amazon with no artist mentioned anywhere. I printed it out , then laid a piece of graph paper over it and drew lines in the grid to follow the lines of the painting. I wish I had drawn the grid first on the printout. After I colored my picture with colored pencils I realized that it would be helpful to have the grid on the printout so I made my own “carbon copy” paper by rubbing an old blue eyeliner pencil all over a piece of paper. I used that to transfer the grid to the printout from my drawing. I plan to follow this “pattern” loosely. My finished quilt probably won’t look much like the original. I want to try doing this with curved improv piecing. My only experience with curved improv is a few blocks I made once that I didn’t use for anything because I didn’t like how they came out. This will be made of 192 blocks that finish at 3”. 9/2/26. did a rough sort of my strings. Hoping to use a lot of them up on this quilt. Made my first 5 blocks. This is fun! 9/7/26: i have the first 3 rows of blocks made. I think I wasted my time doing the colored pencil drawing because I’m not using it. I’m just studying one square at a time on the printout and coming up with a loose interpretation in curved piecing. This is tricky for me to let go of trying to make a perfectly accurate copy. It’s also hard to figure out how to make things land where I want by guessing. I’m getting better at it the more blocks I make. I’ve abandoned the idea of using strings to make this. They’re just not wide enough. I’m making lots of scraps with the trim-downs of these blocks because I have to oversize them so much. Will have to come up with some sort of crumb piecing to use those up. Silly me, thinking I’d use up scraps on this quilt! 9/12/26: used Timna Tarr’s method of appliqué for the sun. Had to do a little refresher course on the method . I forgot to draw my pattern on the SHINY side of the freezer paper. Messed up the first block and had to start over. I forgot how much I enjoy doing this method on the Vesta. I had to use this method for a few other blocks where I wanted a deeper curve. 9/16/26: I have more than half of my blocks completed. I’m learning a lot! Finding it helpful to keep drawing the outline of the ruler around what I have pieced together so far on each block where i intend to cut it to make it easier to figure out where to cut the curve for the next piece. I am using my Inktense blocks to change the color of some fabrics when i can’t find the right color. I also sometimes use the wrong side of the fabric to get a lighter shade. I’m trying to keep the straight of grain lined up on all pieces which usually means I need a piece of scrap around 3 1/2” unless I just need a little piece for a corner. This creates lots of triangle-ish cut offs which I’m cutting down into HST’s and HRT’s. I’ve been sewing together HST’s and QST’s as leaders and Enders while doing this project. That’s slowing me down because I’m pressing them along with my improv pieces and I have to keep stopping to cut more white triangles because most of my HST’s are not light enough for the light side. Not to mention the time spent cutting all those tiny triangle scraps. I actually really enjoy that part though because it is a little mindless break from the improv work. 10/6/26 finished piecing all blocks last night. Spent the better part of today fixing or doing over all the blocks that I wasn’t happy with (about 10 of them). I’m including a photo of the scrappy little blocks I’ve been doing as leaders and Enders alongside this project. Not sure what I’ll do with them yet but I enjoy making them. Some of the seams are VERY bulky with this kind of piecing. I had to press all seams open. I finger pressed them open first, then I starched them by spraying a little Faultless spray starch in the cap and applying it to the seam with a small square ended paint brush before pressing with the iron. I think the paint brush works much more reliably than the starch pen from Acorn that i used to use. I am a little worried that Rita is going to get stuck on these thick seams. 10/14/26: finished piecing the top! Took 6 weeks. 10/20/26: cut the Peltex for this. Figured out that I am using $13.43 worth of Peltex for it. The Peltex wasn’t wide enough so I overlapped 2 pieces and cut them together with a wavy line. Then I put them together with batting tape. This was tricky because I wanted the Peltex fused to the backing and it has to be ironed from the fabric side. My backing fabric was just wide enough to give me a couple inches on either side so I was trying to be very careful to get the Peltex lined up perfectly. I fused one piece of Peltex on first, then butted the wavy cut line of the second one up to it and fused the batting tape onto the join, then flipped the whole thing over and fused the second piece of Peltex to the fabric. This worked but I measured wrong when lining it up and now I only have about an inch of backing fabric extra on one side. Will have to baste a leader to it for the frame. My fusible fleece wasn’t long enough so I had to piece that too. Found that it’s better to cut the curvy line on one side, then cut the second to match. Cutting them together distorts the line as you go. I stitched them together by hand with a ladder stitch. I have about $26 into the fleece and Peltex for this quilt. I am wondering if I could have used Peltex fused to the back with a layer of 80/20 batting over it? Something to try in the future. 10/22/26: got quilt loaded on frame and started quilting. Was challenging to load and roll something so stiff. I don’t think I’d want to go any bigger with this method. I tried quilting the lines back and forth but when I tried to go from right to left my stitches were uneven so I’m doing each line left to right and breaking thread each time. I started by putting a line of stitching across the middle of each row in my first pass, then a second, third, etc. until each row had seven lines somewhat evenly spaced. I decided that was enough. I’m doing the lines freehand and trying to make them a little wavy without crossing each other. Using clear Monopoly for upper thread with light silver Bottom Line in bobbin. No tension issues. Only one thread break so far. Rita is chugging through those super thick seam allowances. 10/23/26: finished the quilting Went pretty quickly. Had a few thread breaks but tension remained good throughout the whole quilt. 10/31/26: made the hanging sleeve using video “Libby Lehman: Make a Quilt Sleeve”. It was very hard to hand stitch the sleeve into this stiff quilt. I had to use a curved needle. WHAT I LEARNED: 1. Strings do not work well for this kind of curved piecing, unless it’s a spot where I only want a sliver to show and it’s not going to be on the diagonal. For most pieces I need something wider. 2. There’s a lot of waste involved in curved piecing. 3. For deeper curves, you can clip the concave side 1/8” deep. 4. Improv can lead to decision fatigue. I’m looking forward to doing a simple charity quilt when this is done. 5. You should have some leaders and Enders ready to piece along with this type of project because you can’t really chain piece it. 6. I don’t think it’s a great idea to use Peltex for something so big that you’d need to piece the Peltex. It was a pain but I have to say, it does hang beautifully.