I have been really slow in posting here lately, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. In the meantime I managed to finish another one of my personal projects. In 2016 the 365 Challenge Quilt was a big hit, and I started making the blocks in January, not knowing if I really wanted to make the whole quilt. But it sounded like fun, and I made a block a day for the first two months of the year. Then the blocks went into a box because we moved to a different house, and I unpacked them again a year later. I managed to make another month’s worth of blocks and then decided that I didn’t like the project. I was getting increasingly frustrated with the instructions, it was very obvious that the designer had just drawn up the quilt in EQ but never actually sewn it, and I ended up unpicking several blocks and redoing them my way. I gave up, and the blocks went back into a drawer.
Last November I signed up with this project for my guild’s UFO challenge. Giving myself this deadline was the only way I was ever going to finish this quilt, I was very close to just putting the blocks on the giveaway table at the next guild meeting. I put them together in a way that is close to the original design, and I still don’t like the quilt. Considering how long it took to assemble all those 3″ blocks and how small many of the pieces are, the layout just doesn’t do it justice in my opinion. The individual blocks just get lost in that dark border. Quilting the centre block was fun but I didn’t put too much effort into the pieced borders, the quilting wasn’t going to be very visible anyway. I picked a floral pantograph design and then just echoed around it. I actually prefer the back, I pieced leftover fabrics because I didn’t have enough of the floral batik and couldn’t get more. But it is finished, so I will stop complaining, and I will donate it to the guild’s We Care program next month.
