Grand total: 756 triangles. That I'm using.

The time at Rita's house today was exactly what I needed. No phone calls...well, okay. One phone call, from Julia, who wanted let me know that she "throwed up" today. But no Internet and no cooking a hot Costa Rican lunch for our workman, as I've been having to do all week. Or has it been two weeks by now?

Anyway.

Rita has a couple of old doors that she leaned up against the wall (the first picture was taken when I thought I would only be using one door. Then I did some math and decided that I would need both.)

I brought a big sheet of batting to drape over the doors; the texture of the batting, plus the slight angle of the surface, keeps the pieces from falling off, for the most part. I did use pins in the first couple of rows because the ceiling fan was blowing the pieces off the board, but once I got down a little lower, that wasn't a problem anymore.


The photos show a few stages in the process of laying out the triangles and deciding how I want to position the different colors. I decided several days ago not to restrict the color placement to the traditional two colors per block, but instead to consider quilt as a whole and disregard the fact that it is built as a series of blocks. With the color placement crossing block boundaries, the blocks themselves are simply a means of construction, rather than the focus of the design. As I mentioned earlier, I do still have to obey the value placement (the relative positions of darker and lighter fabrics) or the illusion of circles and waves will be lost.


I ended up deciding on a vertical layout of 7 blocks by 9 blocks, so the finished quilt will measure 42 by 54 inches (plus any borders I end up adding). It's bigger than that right now because each triangle has a quarter inch of extra fabric on each edge for a seam allowance.


As I neared the bottom of the layout, I found that I was going to run out of dark fabrics before I got to the end of the layout. Since I knew my darkest colors needed to be concentrated in the lower right corner, I moved to that area and began working from the bottom up. I had to rearrange a bunch of pieces that I had already put in, but working from the corner upward made a dramatic difference in the overall effect, and was well worth doing.

I cut extra pieces from three fabrics, which provided enough triangles to complete the layout, as well as enough flexibility to shift things around and get a good flow.


Overall, I'm very pleased, and it looks a lot like I had imagined it, and also is not at all what I had pictured, if you can see what I mean. I'm not 100% satisfied with the layout, but it's definitely good enough to go ahead and make, if I decide I don't feel like getting back into it.


I transported it home by lowering the whole thing to the floor (with help!), then folding the extra batting up over the pieces, and rolling the whole thing up gently. I hope the pieces aren't being stressed, since a triangle cut out of fabric has bias edges (cut on the diagonal) and is fairly prone to stretching and distortion if it's not handled gently. But the only other option was to take it all down while keeping things in order and that didn't seem like a very attractive option at all.

Plus, this way I actually can go back and make a few changes if I really want to.