[Long post] Spent some time today puzzling together the back side of a quilt I started before I left for college (2012) - lol this was supposed to go, completed, with me to college, with the understanding that I wouldn't cry if this got beaten up because I made it myself. I already graduated, so that's one deadline I can no longer miss. I cut the original 2 colours ("front") in a way that meant that the fabric remnants, while having the correct total mathematical "area" to comprise the back of the quilt, would mean that I would be sewing together things like a 1-inch strip or L-shape to make up for the shitty directions I cut the fabric. It's hard to explain, but the basic fault was that I should've cut from the fabric lengthwise instead of widthwise. I'm sure my dumb ass directly calculated the area of fabric I needed before I went to buy it, since I had no way of knowing what width fabric is sold on the rolls. (I still don't.)
Also of note, I have never sewn a finished quilt before, let alone a quilt front with only 2 colours (grandma gave me leftover squares as a kid to make a partial quilt top, I still have that WIP, but I couldn't be choosy with the colours on that one). I have sewn non-quilt items using quilting squares/triangles. (And other sewn items.)
All that's water under the bridge now, though, because my grandma offered me a ton of quilting fabric the week before last. While I don't ideally want to work with tiny pieces of quilting fabric, because most of my personal sewing needs/goals require very large pieces for wearables, I still needed to finish my quilt. I picked out what would match the black and gold theme. Today, I measured every single piece and my own wonky leftovers. I uploaded pictures of the fabric patterns to Clip Studio Paint, and got to work making a mockup of the front as it already exists, and puzzling together the back in a way that fit the checkerboard of the front, made sense visually (no duplicates/follows a pattern), and made use of the sizes of fabric I now had on hand.
[F=filigree, dotted (not the original/bold gold leaf one); C=crosshatch: these are the only 2 fabric colours that could be mixed up in my gremlin room lighting]
Unfortunately, it seems that I made an estimation mistake about the utter unusability of my leftover solid black fabric after loading this completed DIY guide on my phone, but the black border fabric (showing as grey in the photo but it's black-on-black)? It's the perfect size of substitute, so I will just switch the solid black of the quilt front for the black-on-black border fabric, and that won't be any issue to workflow, even if it does bother me not having the 'correct' guide on display. This guide is literally just for me. I just wanted to share it, because I love using CSP for random shit since I'm so familiar with it, and this made my life much less risky to plan ahead, rather than cut first and figure out the layout on the floor. Like, first of all, I don't even know how many squares I'll need, so I'd rather not cut every square possible and wind up with extra. Second of all, I did need the digital program as opposed to doing this all on paper like I did for the front. Because 108 squares is a lot to draw/label, especially on paper.
I did go through a few digital reshufflings as I counted how many of each square were used in each iteration, and reconciled that with the measured dimensions. I gave up on trying to keep every single square organized into 2-row folders, because that was a hassle to click around especially when I needed to swap between row-sets, so I UNLEASHED EVERY SQUARE into one singular folder and toggled back and forth on the layer-moving tool's options between 'moving the item I clicked' vs 'the entire selected layer'. (Both were extremely useful. Usually I keep it on the entire layer setting as default though.) I had to add and delete squares, and then locate the 'to-be-deleted' squares (due to fabric limitations) from that sea of 108 squares/layers. ((Fellow artists will note that there are 2 quilts plus swatches in this image, therefore many more layers - but I think I condensed the first 'front' squares into one layer since that design was already complete, excluding the border, and only needed to be a visual reference for planning the back.))
I also, at one point of needing to reduce the number of certain fabric colour squares, needed to wrangle all of the gold squares into one folder and all of the black squares into another (checkerboarding) in order to visualize the patterns each colour-type needed. It was hard to see the patterns when there were 2 different colour-based repetitions going on in 2 directions each (diagonals at that) for both black and gold, so I put on my bishop's hat (checkmate) and got to dragging each square into yet another set of folders. I actually had to expand my layer window while making this, when I usually keep it as slim as possible (I never work full-screen with any program, even if it would be beneficial, because it's overwhelming to me to not see the desktop. It's like my literal irl desktop is covered when that happens, and that's just stressful to me in irl or virtual.)
Anyway, yeah, the guide is all set to go. I can start cutting and sewing squares for the back. I really wanted to have some thick fluffy batting for this to be super plush, but I will have to settle for the thin type I was given in 2012 to complete this (by grandma at the time, since I didn't know what kind to buy when I bought my fabric back then, and I still don't, but I don't have the luxury of buying more right now. I also want to be done.)
I wasn't planning on this to be a double-sided quilt, but I'm kind of excited seeing it laid out like this, one side is order and the other is chaos. Or alternately, one side is unredacted and the other is censored. (How yin yang of me. 90s kid-me would be proud.)