The College Fjord quilt is going to be the most difficult quilt I have attempted so far. I made a SPREADSHEET. It’s ugly.
Let’s discuss, for the moment, the fact that I still cannot find the solid blues I want and that the indecision surrounding said blues has (temporarily, I hope) paralyzed forward momentum on this project for my ADHD brain. (Also, let’s ignore the fact that I have had a metric crap-ton of other things on my plate for the last few weeks, and I have not really been able do sit down and do anything in the sewing room beyond finishing a couple of bindings and watching old episodes of “All Things Great and Small.” (So excited about the new season in January! But I digress…)
I actually shouldn’t say that I haven’t found the blues I need for this project. I have found the blues for the mountains. Six of them. Muted blues, ranging from so-dark-it’s-almost-black to so-light-it’s-almost-white. Found them in one store actually – it was pretty perfect.
My issue has been finding solid sky blues. Bright blues. None of this muted nonsense. The morning sky (and the sky in this photo) is a brilliant, sapphire blue ranging from deep royal blue to, again, a blue that’s almost white, but a different almost-white than the muted blue almost-white. I can hear you now – “A blue that’s almost white is a blue that’s almost white. You can’t have different shades of it.” I (and the people who make paint chips you can get at the hardware store) beg to differ. Trust me, there is a difference.
A few weeks ago, I found a jelly roll of Kona solid blues and thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It looked perfect in the roll, inside its plastic, in the store. I got it home and unrolled it and…it was no longer perfect. Some of the colors stuck out like sore thumbs. There were 12 different shades of blue. I put them up on the design wall and picked out a couple of them as being wrong. I’ve been staring at them for weeks, and I can’t decide whether I need another roll or two (one roll doesn’t have enough for my project), or if I should just start over from scratch. And I also can’t decide whether I should use the 2.5” strips as is or cut them down to 1.5” strips for a true bargello (and a better blend from light to dark). At it’s longest, the sky needs to be 13.5” – with 2” (finished) strips, I only need 7 blues, but with 1” (finished) strips, I need double that, which means finding even more blues.
See why there’s a ton of indecision paralysis? I feel like I need to decide how many blues I actually need before I can go out and find them, and at the same time, I feel like I need to see how many blues I can find before I make a decision about how many of them I need. I don’t want to decide I absolutely MUST have 14 blues, only to find that I can only actually locate ten of them.
Ugh.