Picnic at the Pier Quilt - A Granny Square EPP Quilt

A few months ago Free Spirit sent me this beautiful Rising Tide Fabric by Monika Forsberg. It was really different in print variety and style that I usually use - lots of novelty prints, no basics. It sat on my desk for a few weeks while I mulled over what to do with it. While the fabric wasn't my style, I LOVE the creative challenge of figuring out how to best show off fabric by matching it with a great design. 

One of the first things I did was pull out my stash of solids - another category of fabric I rarely use.  I knew that I would want to create some contrast around these prints, and I thought solids might be a good place to start. Once I collected these co-ordinating colours, I felt really excited. It was such a rich, beautiful colour palette! 

I decided on the Granny Square quilt design from my Postcard Quilts Collection, and the blocks inspired the name Picnic on the Pier. 

When Tim and I were in New York City last year, we took a day walking along the river, down the High Line to the south point of the island, and then around and across the Brooklyn Bridge. I love seeing a city on foot, stopping at the things that catch our attention, finding cool places to eat, stumbling across beautiful parks and views we didn't know were in store for us when we mapped out the path on Google Maps. One of the stops we made was at Pier 54's Little Island. Breakfast packed, we climbed the man-made mound covered in gardens, and ate while we overlooked the river and the highway the follows it, and talked to the friendly gardener about life in the city. I remember watching the cars flow by and thinking, "It's such a special thing to be a tourist in a city, rather than a commuter!" The energetic attention that you give to the air and the colours and the details of the buildings can be a difficult and forgotten discipline in ordinary life, and come so easily in travel. 

Stitching these blocks in the beginning was a bit like being a tourist. The fabrics weren't familiar or like home to me, but it was so interesting and fun playing with them and seeing what came of the colours and the shapes. I made little Xs of prints around a solid centre, and then laid them all out to choose the next round of colours. The solid colours and the playful prints were so happy! And when I sewed the solid squares around the Xs, I was glad I made the right choice for a design for these rich and interesting prints.

I chose the next round of squares - from the prints again - with confidence, but then once I sewed them on, I started to become uncertain. The outside round made the blocks busy and they'd lost their spark. What should I do? 

My freedom to make choices about the direction for this quilt was hampered by two creative boundaries - I'd promised Free Spirit I'd have a finished quilt to share by early May, and I wanted this quilt to be an example of the pattern in the Postcard Quilts Collection. Now that I'm on this side of the finish, neither boundaries seem so hard. I could have let the project sit a while longer and just shared my progress on the deadline. I wasn't being paid, just given the fabric free in return for photos using it. I ALWAYS need a chunk of time to let go of the original purpose of the quilt, to let it be what it wants to be. If I'd done that, I might have accepted that a variation of the pattern wouldn't have mattered that much either. 

If I'd decided to wait, I think I might have unpicked the outside rounds and let the blocks be smaller, or kept them and added another solid round to each block. Or it's coming to me just now that I could have unpicked the outside rounds and put another round of solids in their place, keeping to the pattern. That would have still showed off the prints, but kept the rich, high contrast, vintage Granny Square vibe I thought I was achieving before the round of prints were added. How great would that have been!? See - that's why I need time when a project isn't going according to plan. I didn't come up with that until now. 

Instead I kept going, deadline and pattern at the front of my mind, hoping that maybe a bright choice of sashing could save it. I decided on a teal solid, and instead of sewing the sashing and blocks in rows like the pattern calls for, I added the sashing on the side and bottom of each block in case I decided to use different teals from my stash, or even pops of different colours. 

After laying it out and staring at it for ages, I decided to stick to an all teal background. It felt a little bit like giving up. It's very green. Something that could be quite lovely if I was going for that in the first place, but I'm still a bit hung up on my colourful granny square hopes, that it might need to grow on me. It kind of feels like a granny square quilt reflected in water, don't you think? Rather than the bright contrast on the crocheted blankets, the edges are smeared, like city lights on the harbour. 

There are little glimpses of combinations in this quilt that I love, that I caught while stitching it together and then ironing the quilt top, and then laying it out for photos. There are parts that work. Maybe it could end up being a quilt that is loved snuggled up on someone's lap. All the colours smooshed together and the overall design unimportant. I definitely have other quilts like that - quilts I love to use, but don't love held up flat.

One of the most interesting things to come out of pushing through a quilt I stopped liking, was that rather than enjoying the process, I enjoyed the learning. So the time wasn't at all wasted. The dramatic change of the blocks once I added the final rounds is so interesting to me. I appreciated, and I'm also a little chastised by, the reminder that if I can be disciplined and wait, and maybe also write and reflect, rather than just squirm and feel rushed and uncomfortable, that a solution I'm happy with will come. It's hard finishing a quilt that didn't turn out like you hoped, but if you can view the time and the cost of fabric and thread as just the cost of learning, of growing, improving, getting to know colour and also yourself, then the cost of pushing through is never a waste. But hopefully next time, I can hold myself back from pushing through. I can sit with the uncomfortable imperfection a little longer, and I can steer the quilt to something I love. 

Read about a time I did that well below!