This will be a wide piece, at least 2m wide and probably about 1m – 1.25m high. A couple of years back I did a piece I called Lightstream, thinking as I was at the time how as white light passes through a prism it is divided into the rainbow bands of colour. This is a follow up I have been meaning to do for a while, and so it may bear the same name, Lightstream #2. But it is also very much in the style of the Ebb & Flow series. Who knows, I may not name it, as I intend for it to replace a will quilt that has been hanging in my own home for several years. (that one will be retired to a labelled cloth bag.)
As each vertical strip of fabric I am inserting strips into is about 25cm wide, I have at least 4 more to go, maybe 5. I want it to look light and lively, full of motion.

As with all my pieced quilts, this is truly a scrap quilt, more accurately a scrap bag quilt, since I have emptied the bag containing small almost useless size scraps, offcuts, of fabric onto the floor beside my machine, and am diving into that peridocially, putting buts and pieces together to form strips of chunks of colour usually no more than a couple of inches wide, max. As I use them the curvy bits tend to make one edge trail off into a sliver – so that bit comes off and I add something more to make it a useful length again. sometimes I divide up a unit and intersperse another colour, or some cream, which if used occasionally gives the impression of some wandering line suddenly coming to an end part way across the vertical panel.

As with any scrap quilt, it might all look random, haphazard and unplanned ( some would use’intuitive’ here) but once all the strips are pieced, they have to be placed in relation to each other, adjusting either up and down or in different relation to the right or left edge. Probably one or two will need to be pulled out and replaced with something else – a need that doesn’t become clear until later. For example, the rather long sinuous bright blue close to the centre of the photo is a bother now that I step back and look through the lens. I will either break it up with some other colours or replace it totally. Alternatively I might consider long bright blue pieces elsewhere, 2 or 4 more of them (the ikebana principle) I also might even add in more cream here and there, depending on how the final 8 or 9 look done. Light and dark clear and bright, large and small spaces, and ‘incomplete lines’ all need to be balanced in the final assembly. That means another 20 hours or so in the piecing stage I estimate, or in other words, it’s about half pieced.

While all this is going on I am considering glitter, if, which colour and where, and the quilting pattern. At the moment I favour machine quilting with a shiny cream rayon thread wandering randomly from left to right; and that too may change.