Continuing the first JQ of 2015

The printed fabric has had two weeks to dry, plenty of time, too long even, and the JQ is finally underway. First, some layout -

Then, finding fabric for the back, and something for the middle - stiffness might suit the "grids and structures" theme, so I'm using some fairly heavy interfacing that was left over from another project, a 17-foot "river" made in 2003. (See, these leftovers do eventually have a use!) Cutting all the backs and middles at the start of the project is a useful thing to do. Keeping them where you can later find them is useful too...

After a wee while at the machine, stitching down the few blocks of colour with a dark silvery thread, it looks like this -

And that's one of the backs and middles underneath - the interfacing cut to 6x12" size and stitched to the back. I wonder what will happen with the quilting, will the size change at all or will the stiffness prevent that - and if so, what will the top look like, will it be pulled in unattractive ways? The only way to find out is to try. 

Another decision made at the start is that all the quilts will be faced, so the design goes right to the edge rather than being framed.

After doing a minimal amount of quilting, pulling the thread ends through to the back, it was getting very cluttered back there, so I'm having to bury the thread ends, a little job I quite like on an item this small. There could be as many quilting lines as printed lines - I like to think the back will be similar-but-different to the front in its basic patterning.

Note the useful frame, cut out of some stiffish paper. The 6x12" cutout area is useful too - once you have the exact quilt area chosen, put the cutout back in the frame, remove the frame, and draw around the block (and trim if you're adding binding) - or stitch just outside the drawn lines in a different colour, and use those for adding facing, which will be turned to the back.

After doing rather a lot of heavy-thread-in-bobbin stitching from the back (in red and metallic silver) it ended up looking unbalanced - that yellow area is too big! - so I added some criss-cross yellow threads near the bottom -

and then some criss-cross black areas to integrate the yellow ... this could go on and on, but I decided to stop, and here it is, with the edges pinned under (for now) -

One thing does rather lead on to another, and when making this JQ I had in mind the entire series. The "big idea" is to take one element and continue it into the contiguous quilt, so they join up in a frieze somehow -

Instead of working ahead to February, I'm working back to January (and have an inkling of what March will be, too).