Bessie Progress (Long)

 

It's been a long time since I've posted anything about Bessie, so here's a photo of the pattern. The next photos are of the upper left quarter.

This was my last progress photo. The solid white squares are place holders.

Here is the current state of the Bessie:

--There are still two place holder blocks. There are five blocks that are the same: the one in the center of the quilt (lower right corner) and each of the four corners of the quilt. The "real" Bessie has beautiful blocks with piecing that is too unpleasant for me to tackle (think BOTH a bunch of Y-seams and inset curves in a 6" block).  I've chosen to hand piece Star of Hope blocks for these positions. They are all cut and ready to piece.

--Coming down diagonally from the upper left, you'll see three encircled stars. Bessie herself shows -- again -- blocks with very complex piecing in the centers as well as reverse appliqué for the circles. I've chosen to hand-buttonhole (a technique I like a lot, you may recall) these blocks instead. I like the narrow circle Bessie proposes, and I also like stars, so that's what I'm doing. I've just begun the buttonholing of these blocks. I like that these stars will relate to the Star of Hope blocks.

--The next "newish" blocks are the hexagon rings. They are now all completed.

--I still have five of the "fingers" blocks to make.

--Now, look just to the other side of the red Nine Patch blocks; there you find the X blocks. I loved the look of them, but the pattern wanted me to  hand appliqué the dark squares onto the backgrounds and then to reverse appliqué the X motifs. Surely there was another, tolerable, way to make these! So I made Square In A Squares (always fun) and then hand-buttonholed the X in the center of each. There are twenty of these and they are all finished!

Everything that still needs to be finished is cut and clipped together in homogeneous groups. We have the Olympics coming up, always a good time for hand work, I've found. And I predict Bessie will be complete by mid-September.

I asked Himself to admire her yesterday and he had some trouble. He's a precise sort of a person with actual art training as part of his architectural education. He likes many of the individual block types but doesn't think that they relate to each other. I told him, "You'll dislike it less once it's all together. That's happened before." But deep down I was thinking "messy Bessie." 

Since I've made changes to the original design, I prolly should come up with a different name for this quilt. But nothing's coming to mind; I guess I've thought of her as Bessie for too long. Perhaps inspiration will strike. It has before.