Maybe I Do Need a Fish Quilt

The Instagram algorithm decided I wanted to see posts in the Shoal Quilt Sew Along (#shoalsewalong from Nicholas Ball @quiltsfromtheatttic) and dang if it wasn't right. I admired some other makers' improv-style fish and it wasn't long before I had to try "just one or two" myself.

I pulled out some scraps and tried it out. I decided grey would be the background. (I was already thinking that if I "happened to" make more, I could delve into the leftover greys I'm going to have from my Lucy Boston quilt.)

Over the next few days, I had fun sitting down for a few minutes and making a couple fish.

The blocks are really rough (in other words, not neat, similarly sized rectangles) but there's no sense in working on that until you decide how they're going to fit together.

I started to play with some more complicated shapes, like curved tails:

Making two or three at a time was an efficient way to chain sew the seams, alternating from one fish to the other.

Here's my school:

I didn't think I needed a fish quilt, but now I think I might; maybe a baby quilt so this doesn't get too big to handle. I'm thinking about arranging them as a circling school of fish even though it'll be more complicated to put together.

But for now my fish are waiting in a box. I had to clean up my maker space and I'm waiting for a design space (wall? floor? bed?) to be open so I can work on sewing them together. That is going to require a lot of back-and-forth between the design space and the sewing area, and I just don't quite have the energy for that right now.

This design is from Nicholas Ball @quiltsfromtheatttic.