Crazy Thoughts

Melinda of quirkygranolagirl made, and then drew up a pattern for a patchwork Death Star earlier this year. It totally stole my attention as soon as I saw it. It utterly terrified me as well, especially once I saw the ones people were making under the #patchworkdeathstar hashtag on instagram. Totally amazing, making patterned fabrics interplay with colour and shading to get a 3D effect on the Death Star. Daunting. But I was so smitten, I totally wanted to dive in, but my stash of greys are sorely lacking and I couldn't figure out what we'd do with one 12" block - hot pad maybe?? Except we almost never use them, and our kitchen doesn't have that much space...

Well, late one night, long after I should have been in bed, I had a crazy thought. The Death Star's iconic right. What if instead of one Death Star I had a grid of 9? Just like the Andy Warhol prints of iconic stars and soup tins!? What if I used those colours? I didn't go to bed for another three hours.

Colour pairings and choices were made after googling a lot about Andy Warhol, reading from his foundation website, Wikipedia, and just plain old google image search. Then I pulled out my now out of date Kona colour card and tried to figure out some colour gradients. I'm still not sure how well this bit is going. There's always some variety between what's in your card and what comes off the particular bolt you buy from. Plus, asking for a second opinion, even one in the same room, lighting conditions, etc... as you can get different results. Paul and I never agree on colours between green and blue.

I've also discovered that despite knowing my grey stash is dismal, and thinking my solids stash was ok that I actually require to buy a bit of every colour to make each Death Star. So far I can make green and pink. I'll slowly add the other colours in dribs and drabs. I did splash out and buy all the backgrounds though, in case they sold out. They're the only patterned fabric in this quilt - Dear Stella Confetti Dot, dots as a starfield do you feel it?? I'm not sold on using the Peony as the pink background and might go back and buy one of the other pinks to see if they fit better. But we'll see.

The whole thing is planned to finish at around 45" square. Baby quilt size, though with the amount of effort it's taken so far, and I actually found the cutting fabric and wrapping the pieces (even with glue) to be tedious, this is not going to be seeing any babies. I'm thinking it's definitely going on a wall. Which is crazy for whole other reasons I won't go into here.

Anyway, this is a project that has at once trapped me in its thrall, is scaring me into picking it up and putting it down but I never actually walk away, just circle, considering it, until I go back and pick it up again and think well you can always start over. I think it has the possibility to look great, I also think I have the possibility to balls it up royally. I'm still not sure which side of that we're going to fall more on. It's certainly not going to be speedy.

But if it scares me I'm growing, right. Right?


PS yay for having internet back after almost a week!!!!