Continuing saga of new quilt...

I had planned on having a new photo of the quilt for you today but things did not go as I had hoped. I mentioned yesterday that I was going to reveal what didn't work on this quilt and how I fixed it. Well, I can let you know what didn't work but I am still in the process of fixing it.

Here is the photo of the quilt.

I love the colors of the background fabric and it was spectacular but it detracted from the pieced block section. You did not look at the piecing as much as all the colors and patterns in the background. I knew it needed to be a more subdued patterning and coloring for the background. This is more in line with what I wanted the background to be like.

Little pops of color would be ok but I did not like the big bold bands of colors that the original piece had. I also wanted to keep it more in the fallish colors. So I went to my stash to see what I might have. Unfortunately I am quite limited on my larger pieces of hand dyeds. I have very few pieces that are over 1 yard lengths. I tried several pieces to see how they worked. This is called auditioning. The first piece had the right colors but it still was too much pattern to distract the eye.

I could have used the top 8-10" but that still would not have been enough. So I moved on to my 2nd piece which I love, just not for this piece, it has a bamboo type leaf motif in the original print that did not take up the dye that would have been cool as this piece is going to definitely have a leaf theme going but the color was all wrong.

Once again, too much difference, I hoped that it would help pick up the blues in the piecing but it just didn't blend in well enough. I needed a player that did not try to steal the scene. Since I did not have anything else large enough that would do I had to go to the dye baths and try to come up with a piece that would work.
Here are my dye buckets,

you (I) can't just do one piece and call it quits. So I pulled out some things that had been lying around that needed dyed and got started. Ok with a little a lot of prodding from my good friend Tina. I dyed the piece for the front, a backing piece, a linen table cloth I bought last weekend for $1.00 and 3 button down shirts of DH that need to be upcycled due to stains.

Unfortunately, my background fabric still did not come out of the dye bath the way I had envisioned it. It was still too patterned and the colors were too drab. So late last evening it went back into another dye bath. It is getting washed up now so I don't have it to show you yet.

In the meantime, I did a practice piece testing out my batting, thread choice and quilting motif I want to incorporate into the quilt when I get to that point.

I like the motif. I am not sure of the batting. I was going to use a combination of Warm and Natural with Hobbs Heirloom wool on top. It is going to be too heavy, so my next test sample will be just the wool batting. Well, my washing machine just buzzed so it is time for me to go look at my fabric and see if I can go ahead and dry it and get it added to my quilt today or if I have to go back to the drawing board dye bath again.

Have a great day and don't let failures discourage you, they just make you dig deeper into yourself to come up with often times a better solution or end product than the first one would have been. There is always more than one way to accomplish something.