Friday's "Not Quite Finished!"

Linking with " Finish Friday".

Being somewhat OCD I like to have order and few "unfinished" or "in transition"projects.

Out in the longarm area there are a couple of boxes of quilts ready to mail one filled with six QOV's and the other a couple of quilts ready to be returned to the piecer. Unquilted tops are stored in a cabinet so the area looks reasonably tidy but my working studio is a different matter!
On the design wall is Yessenia's graduation quilt for her Master's degree next month, and on the cutting  and sewing tables Carina and Rob's wedding quilt also for next month!
Yessenia's quilt lacks only the bottom border as I await delivery of one more yard of the outer border fabric- BTW I was super lucky that thousandsofbolts.com had just one yard of the fabric left, that was an almost disaster!

 Nearby is the comet quilt [hanging over the embroidery machine cart] that needs quilting, and on the chair back the Modern Quilt awaiting its binding. This is a very small room so every inch has a purpose.
Now to explain a little about the development of Yessenia's quilt; this is the original pattern from a McCall's magazine, but the young lady wanted it in neutrals, grey, black, cream.

Having selected the nine fabrics I was very careful to label each piece with the size and replacement order as I went along and I was very glad that I did or piecing would have been a nightmare of confusion.

But I found I also needed to make up a guide, a key, to more easily identify the fabric substitutions since placement is what ensures this design's appeal.

Numbering the fabrics helped in identification but I did lot of checking and double checking, check twice, sew once, and it worked to forestall frogging and resewing!

When the middle of the quilt was pieced and pinned on the wall I found there was one fabric that offended me, can you spot it? And to my disappointment the quilt appears bland and uninteresting.

 This is the culprit, the odd fabric,

 it is just too far into the blue range, although it doesn't appear as offensive in the photo as in reality. Anyway, the quilt is kind of blah to me, something missing, it needs a bit of punch so let's think outside the box! Time to audition a few possibilities from the stash and after rejecting a couple this black print hit the bull's eye, organic and with just enough pattern to catch the eye but not overwhelm! Thank heavens for the stash!
 It has just enough pattern and was the accent the design needed- and I was a happy quilter! It took perhaps an hour to remove the offending pieces, only four, and replace them with the black.
Today I will work on the wedding quilt and see how far I can get piecing the almost 400 blocks.