Making Progress

I have been working on my latest art quilt in my bias strip series. You can see the beginning of this work and where I want to go with it here on the And Then We Set It On Fire blog. Yesterday, I had a "stitching" at my house and worked on putting the two pieces together. First, here they are separately...

PIECE 1 (24" X 39")

PIECE 2 (16" X 18")

First, I taped together pieces of paper until I got a piece approximately 24" X 39" (the size of my orange piece). I then played with some shapes on the page until I was pretty satisfied with how it looked.

There is a line or two that shouldn't be here, but (in general) it shows the shapes I want to work with. You can see I have numbered the shapes. I drew these shapes onto freezer paper to make templates. I had previously put the blue piece (Piece 2) on my copier and made several copies of that design. I lightly ironed the freezer paper templates to the blue paper copies and cut them out. After removing the freezer paper (and reserving it to use when I need to actually cut shapes out of the blue cloth), I could play with the shapes and get a feel for what they would look like on the orange piece without actually cutting into the sewn blue piece.

Next, I pinned the blue paper shapes onto the orange piece while it was on my design wall.

I then pinned bias strips onto the piece to "cage" the blue paper shapes.

I think the bias strips make the whole piece pop! However, I really wasn't satisfied with the "heavy" piece at the bottom, so I revised. This is what it looks like now.

I like it better, but I'm thinking about adding a piece to the "empty" bias strip at the top right. As you can see (if you look closely at the shape on the lower right), I haven't made enough bias strips yet; so that has to be done too. Since I haven't cut into my pieced blue cloth yet, there is still room for lots more play. I may just try some improvisational placement of the bias strips and "cages" and see what happens with that. I'll post again, when I have that done.

What do you think?