Triangulate

In March, I asked my do.Good Stitches: Empower circle to make Triangle-in-Triangle blocks. They indulged my crazy idea, and I had a big pile of triangles to make into a quilt. For both time and design reasons, the triangles stayed in a pile for weeks, maybe even months. Although I loved experimenting with the triangle block, I never made a plan for how I would turn the triangles into a quilt top.

I tried a number of layouts -- rows, hexagons (big and giant), diamonds, trapezoids -- with a number of different color schemes -- like colors together, contrasting colors together, rainbows. None of them clicked. They just didn't feel right -- some were too chaotic, some lacked unity, some bored me. I returned the triangles to their piles and let them be.

One night, while annoyingly awake at 4 am, I thought anew about the layout problem. At which point I had the amazingly obvious pair of realizations: I love negative space and thus needed to use it with the triangles. I love irregular, geometric designs and thus needed to apply that idea to the triangles. So I did.

I connected some triangles and left others standing alone. I let some rows sit side-by-side, and I inserted some space between others. I started with some triangles farther apart and chopped fabric to bring some closer together. It changed along the way, as is my style, and I like the result. Now I just need to quilt it.