Eureka!
Anyone else have a love/hate relationship with technology? On upbeat days I am awed by all the gifts technology has given me. For example, this blog. Never could I have imagined, decades back, I could write a post, send it into the cloud and have you read it, whether you live in my home town or the opposite side of the world. When technology works, it is easy to take it for granted. However, when it fails what do you do? Time to problem solve and possibly reach out to others.
Sometime, late last July, my site crashed, fatal error level crashed. My host was able to resurrect it, BUT blogging was onerous and my followers’s list was vaporized. I could post, but if you followed me, you didn’t receive a notification. I won’t bore you with the details, but I have kicked my host to curb, migrated my site to new a host, added a post notification plugin to my site, tested it and it works. Eureka! You can sign up to receive my posts at the end of this one.
Art Solutions
One of the advantages of solving my tech fiasco is more time in the studio. I actually finished two Celestial Celebration rows this week. I’ve opted not to stitch the rows to each other yet. This way if I want to change a fabric swatch or switch an orientation of a block it is relatively easy to do.
Tweaking Towards a Solution
Solutions are rarely as simple as flipping a switch from off to on. Instead they take practice, observation, trying this or that and learning what works and what doesn’t. I have also learned, after 35 plus years of quilting, what works for one person, isn’t always what works for another. I did promise to share the method I continue to develop for piecing a Drunkard’s Path block variation. Use the arrows to move through the 8 images showcasing my method.
Ultimately, I chose to use small tabs of painter’s tape to hold my foundation papers in place. I find pins can distort the fabric. This method is more accurate. 
The curved line of the arc is stitched with tiny stitches. I set the length on my Bernina to 1.25. This makes it easy to remove the paper without needing to spend extra picking out small pieces. 
Once the seam line stitching is in place the paper segment covering the seam allowance is easily peeled away. 
The final prep for the arc is to clip and turn the seam allowance to the back using the seam line stitching as a guide. 
The back side of a paper pieced block showing the stitching lines and my notes about which fabrics to place where. 
The fan portion of a Celestial Celebration block has been paper pieced for accuracy. 
The fan shape is capped with the arc shape pinned and ready to be stitched in place. 
I use the blind hem stitch to secure the arc to the fan.
I am linking up with Nina Marie’s Off the Wall Fridays.
I love your ability to choose wonderful colors for your quilts. They are always amazing!
Thank you, Chris. When I recall my first few attempts at selecting fabric for my quilts – OUCH! Let’s just say coming up with a palette for my artwork didn’t come naturally. Now, it is second nature. Of course, I have 35+ years to practice. 🙂
Love the way this quilt is coming along!
Thank you, Angela.
yes, love hate… well lots of anger too… it used to be so easy then it changed on blogger at least. LOVE your low contrast circles, so much.
Blogger was what I started out with. Then Blogger wasn’t meeting my expectations, so I switched to WordPress. The reality is there are so many, behind the scenes, moving parts, between the host, the server, the blog software, and with WordPress, plugin software, that nailing down where the breakdown is can be quite difficult. No surprise none of those moving parts can believe it has anything to do with them.
My circles remind me of your hexies. Individually, they hold their own. Collectively they can be manipulated into all sorts of designs.