After looking at this mess of pieces stuck to my wall for awhile, I did what any normal person would do: today I started to take them down. I had put all the “extra” or “left over” pieces into a more secure and much smaller storage situation. Perhaps that gives other quilters the heebee-geebees, the notion of having so many “extra” pieces that putting them away is required. My extra pieces often get stored away and brought out for a future project.

When you want to work with a range of colors and textures and there’s not a set pattern, well, you have to either cut each piece as you want it or cut a bunch of everything and see what you want next. The first option might be more fabric sparing but it would be ridiculous and slow as hell. The second choice is much more efficient for the sticking-on-wall part but of course results in cutting more pieces than you need because you don’t really know how many of each you’ll need.

So I start with a big pile of fabric that I pull out of my stash and a bunch of strips that were left from having cut things for other projects and I cut until I have a lot of pieces. Then I stick a lot of pieces onto my design wall. When I have what I think I want (more on this in a moment) I stop and look at it for some amount of time and then I take it down.

The process of taking it down has to be a way that allows me to keep it all oriented as it was while stuck on the wall. It also has to be taken down in a way that will allow all the pieces to be sewn together in a fairly efficient manner. Otherwise, I can confidently say, I’m probably not going to do it. I look for straight forward ways that won’t make me mess up the order of the pieces and to allow sewing it.

How many pieces do I want? Well, enough to get the effect I’m going for without pieces being too small (I’m not a masochist after all!) and enough to be big enough without being ridiculous. I would work bigger (finished size) probably if I didn’t have to occasionally ship things but after a point bigger is just bigger, and eventually it gets silly-big. I already work bigger than many people and I don’t think most of my quilts are all that big. I used to routinely make things that were 90 X 108 or so inches and didn’t think they were all that big.

The piece size can’t be too big or there’s not enough variation across the finished work but there’s a limit to how little things can get before it’s just too small. I don’t usually fussy cut pieces but I can choose pieces which add more color or pattern as though they were pieced. Or I might piece them.

Obviously the process of taking things down off the wall gives me way too much time to think about how the pieces got up there in the first place. Or maybe it’s just to keep me from thinking about all the sewing ahead.

I took about one-third of the total thing off the wall tonight. It surprised me how many pieces were stuck to the wall, total.