Some Quilt-y But Not All

I spent most of the day down there wrangling strips and stripes of fabric and adding to the layer of thread schnipples on the floor but I didn't get to the point where I'm ready to put what I made together into something resembling a quilt top.  My purpose was to head toward something "modern" to stretch my innate Germanic "right"-ness senses, to make something colorful and chaotic but quilt-like, sorta.  I had a bunch of swaths (there's just no better word) of random strips sewn together months ago when I first felt the urge to branch out into uncharted territory and then stashed in a bin to wait.  I bought a quilt book, a free-form quilt book for my Kindle and have read through it and read the pictures a bunch, so I thought I kind of had an idea.  It was very hard for me to not use the ruler to cut sections of those swaths but I did my darnedest to not ruler the hell out of my cuts, and I used other random strips left from the swath sewing to separate the pre-sewn pieces.  I realized when I was telling Durwood about what I was doing at supper that I was still letting my innerHitler have a hand in my work when I told him that while I was just sewing pieces together in ways that pleased me I was also trimming the blocks to a uniform size, a big uniform size (9 1/2" X 20-ish"), but they're all pretty much the same size, so I decided that what I'm making is blocks of chaos.  I started the sixth block after supper but got kind of lost in a diagonal cut and had to quit for the night.

Oh.  I just laid out the 5 blocks I finished on a dark background and took their picture to show you.  I like them much better this morning than I did last night AND I think I actually shut my innerHitler up for the making.  Now I feel like I can make another one--or bazillion--blocks this way and appease that nagging voice going on and on (and ON) about cutting things even and matching up seams and sewing straight and making things match or blend.  Those of you who know that I rarely wear matching socks (except when it's cold and I wear my extra warm socks) and don't really follow fashion or color rules in knitting might be surprised at how hard I have to work to be independent and "creative" that way but it's a struggle that actually makes me a little queasy.  I'm determined (my Germanic ancestors marching in straight rows back to infinity) to step off the "should" path and frolic in the messy and creative weeds over here.  Woohoo.

December 29--Walker Evans, Floyd and Lucille Burroughs on Porch, Hale County, Alabama.  Too many generations of feet had smoothed the floorboards on the porch.  Floyd's mama says they were that way when she was a girl and that the pine smell of the wood only rose on long rainy days in spring when  everything smelled like it'd grow.  Lucille, they called her Cele unless she was in trouble, mostly lived on the porch.  She sat out there to hull butterbeans or shell peas, and if she had a book to read that's where she'd read it.  Books were rare in Hale County.  The school had a few but they wouldn't let them out and the library had them, of course, but the Burroughs didn't belong and wouldn't be welcome if they did.

Okay, it's time for CBS Sunday Morning and I'm not missing it, not even for you.  Stay warm today, we're supposed to have falling temps all day, big wind, and maybe make it into the single digits by tomorrow.  I love my wool socks.

--Barbara