AUGH! No TIME!

Like Sands in the Hourglass....

It's been a crazy 2 weeks! Between family members showing up unexpectedly (My 74 year old aunt hitch-hiked in from Edmonton... ) and traveling here there and everywhere I've not had anytime for anything! AUGH! I missed my sewing machine!

I am starting to feel the strain of not having enough time, I did however make up some lost time with a vengeance yesterday and today and got 2/3's of the giant granny panties quilted:

I just have the outer edges to complete. I don't know if you can really see the pattern but it is a giant flower with 8 petals, I've been intrigued by the notion of zentangles but haven't gotten around to actually doing a quilt in that fashion. 

So I wanted something very feminine and elegant like the flower found in my Butterfly Quilt and I had to consider just how I wanted them placed, DING!! Lightbulb moment! 

Why not just combine the element of zentangles with the idea of a flower? So I sketched out the flower design I wanted, the very centre square is the sunflower flower found on Leah Day's Quilt along #40 and from there I did 4 huge petals like the cardinal points of a compass N S E W and 4 secondary petals in ordinal directions (NE SE SW NW).

The 4 major petals are filled with opposing patterns, paisley in E & W and flowing lines/echo shell in N & S petals. My flowing lines kept turning into echo shells, so the combination of the two is really quite cool:

The petal in the upper left contains the flowing lines/ echo shell combination, the ordinal petals I just simply echoed the shape or my original drawing and then a paisley petal.

It took me a couple of days to really get feeling this, I had to pick one of the petals apart since the shape was not right, it looked more like a beaver tail than anything. I did hand baste the shape I wanted before I picked the stitches which made all the difference, I think if I do this again I will use hand basting rather than pins or a combination of the two just so I don't have to fight with following lines that are unclear or blurred.  The one thing I really had to reign myself in on was being TOO fussy.... I was really hard on myself with this since it is for Mom and I want it perfect, I took my inner dialogue and kicked it's puny rear end into submission. Reality is, I am still a novice at this, the more I fussed the worse things looked. There are a couple of slight puckers (puckers piss me off...) nothing nearly as bad as what I had been noticing before I started stabilizing my quilts (thank you Leah Day!) but in my head they seemed massive and insurmountable, I had this strong urge to pick them out and redo the area but I realized if I kept doing that... this quilt would not get done and possibly it would get damaged by all the stitch ripping!

NO!, NO! I say, I shall not become perfect at stitch ripping! I will learn to pay attention to how my quilt feels under my needle and learn to spread my fabric better so it doesn't pucker! 

Once I made peace with myself and my inner dialogue I really began to see the work I was doing and I can now appreciate the effort more even if I am not 100% happy with it, Mom will be and that's what matters.

One my biggest motivators is the fact I have a official UFO. My Dad's quilt has been set aside so I could complete my Mom's and I realized I have less than a month complete it! I need to make 6 more squares and then put it together plus quilt it. If that wasn't enough I want to make 4 stockings (which are sitting at the guild in a WIP state) and to put a curve ball in the mix, I've been given my first commissioned quilt due in 2 weeks! Thank goodness it's a baby quilt which should be super simple and I am hoping I can knock it out in a few days.  That's all for this week... I hope.

Furiously being passionate about my machine....

Chris.