Random thoughts

It's Wednesday and it feels like Tuesday, but I wish it was Friday. Confused? I love three day weekends but they really mess me up when it comes to figuring out what day it is. It is Wednesday though, and that means 2 more days until I can do things around my house that I want to work on. Namely, a quilt I'm working on for my sister.

Three years ago I went to Maine for a family reunion and went shopping with my sister to a quilt shop in Windham. My sister fell in love with a charm pack of fabric by Tula Pink called Full Moon Forest. I didn't look at that fabric again for over a year. By the time I decided I wanted to make something with that charm pack, the fabric line was out of production and not be found anywhere - believe me, I tried. I even contacted Tula Pink herself to see if she had any connections that could hook me up with more charm packs. I then had a brilliant idea that I would make a quilt out of several of Tula's fabric lines: Plume, Hushabye, Flutterby and Prince Charming. That idean turned out to be more difficult than I thought at the time. Apparently, my timing is way, way off. I scoured ebay, etsy and online quilt shops on a regular basis (like over a year) until I was able to acquire all the charm squares and yardage I needed to make the quilt.

I decided I wanted to make a twister quilt with her initial "N" embedded in the fabric layout. I shuffled fabric squares until I thought my OCDness would drive me crazy trying to get the layout perfect. The thing with sewing together 5 1/2" squares and then cutting them up and sewing them together again is the potential of creating a real resentment over handling the same fabric over and over again. I'm almost there. With the resentment, not finishing the quilt top.

My sister fell in love with the preliminary quilt top (pre re-cutting the twister blocks) and loved the size (very large). She wasn't real thrilled with the idea that I was going to cut into the fabric and potentially ruin what she thought was a pretty quilt. To me it was boring just having large squares sewn together, so I convinced her it needed to be done. I should have kept my opinions to myself. I've cut and sewn 9 rows together with another 18 to go. Yipee!!!!!!!!

What I've discovered now that after some rows are sewn together is that it is going to finish smaller than I thought. I knew that I was going to lose inches in the re-cutting process, but until I could actually see it, it's hard to imagine how much smaller it's turning out. I now feel like I need to add a 4" border to increase it's size. More fun and money!