Jane Austen quilt, part 4 - diamond placement begins

Painstakingly, all 494 464 (I miscounted!) diamonds required for the center section of the quilt have been cut out.  These are the light and medium values of purple.  Jane Austen (apparently) simply random scattered her pieces.  Admirable and it turned out well.

Except that *I* don't do random well.  I like plans.  Even guidelines.  But pure random?  iiiieeeee!!  I've done the "pull the next piece out of a brown bag and use it" approach.  I *STILL* micro-manage it!

However, pandemonium may have been averted. Dear Daughter #2 (the purple loving daughter) has decided that she'd like a kinda/sorta/maybe/almost colorwash effect .... starting with the lighter shades next to the center medallion and shading out to the darker values. Hmmmm ... I think, maybe,  I could do this.

So tonight, I spent a good amount of time grading the color values of all the light shades.  Well, I graded them as well as I was able to .. heh .. I even remembered to pull out my Ruby Beholder to even out the color playing field!

This layout is (obviously) an on-point layout.  Furthermore, the very center .. the part that looks white ... is going to be a big embroidered medallion on a single piece of fabric.  The diagonal rows surround this center medallion.

For this reason, I think it would be just about impossible .. for me ... to simply start at a corner and build from there.   After all, I have absolutely NO idea just which shades of the light & medium values are going to be exactly where.  I have a *general* idea, but no specifics.

Therefore, I decided to build it on my design wall as it would look in real life.  This means that I need a placeholder for the center medallion, since despite my calculations, I don't want to chance cutting the center medallion fabric the wrong size.  Knowing me, it would be 1/2" too small all the way around. :-)

So, I made a paper placeholder, measured on my design wall (a queen sized sheet) where the center medallion "should" be and began pinning the diamonds to the sheet according to my color plan, as shown above.

And here we are, so far.

Not too exciting.  The bright green start at the top is where the top/center of the quilt "should" be.  I measured down from that spot to the mid-point of the center section (I hope) and began the placement of the light diamonds.

According to the color guide, I have 3 rows of lights then 6 rows of mediums before it starts with the lights again.

The real thing may or may not look vaguely like the graphic ... mainly because it's easy to color a row of shapes the same color ... using the actual fabrics is a different story!

The final result may not be so controlled and concentric.  It may have a tendency to become muddled ... simply because of the fabrics I have to use.

I was, however, gratified to see that in the first row around the center medallion, the number of diamonds that I place around it *does* match the number of diamonds in the graphic!  woo hoo!!  I'll sure take those small victories!  :-)

The placement of diamonds continues onward.