I am doing many projects. The dog pad and a class learning to free motion quilt are great, useful, productive activities but they are avoidance. What I really want to do, is quilt the Hopscotch (Bluprint) quilt top I finished sometime back. The problem is, I want to do it WELL. I am stopped by my old perfectionism and fear I will mess it up. Do you know that one? So much better to dive in, but I haven’t. So I play around and practice, or not.
To me, this quilt is special, I want it for my beloved aunt. I haven’t seen her in a long time and a quilt seems like a good way to wrap her in love. I want it to be done well because it will be critiqued – and as I write that, the light bulb flares. I know two things, one, only one person will be looking at it unfavorably and that person probably won’t even want to touch it. Second, IT DOESN’T MATTER what anyone thinks. If my aunt doesn’t want or need it, she is welcome to pass it on, after all, it’s a gift for her. I really don’t have an attachment to what happens after it’s in her hands. I will have done it and given it in love. I had planned on giving her the first one I did from start to finish, but it isn’t finished! My thread kept popping. A bit of research, after rethreading, changing needle, etc, says that I may have basted too tight. Someday, I will visit again.
So I practice. This is the dog pad/practice sandwich I played with for several days. the squares are what I want to use on the quilt. I love the feathers! Fun to do, but they won’t really fit in. Look close and there are flowers, leaves, butterflies and it even says “love you” at the top. Funny though, it hasn’t made it to the dog bed. It sits in front of the loveseat and they are often on it. The kid occasionally drops down on it to try to follow a line.
I have two more cut and another pin-basted, but switched gears to play with another Bluprint class. This one is Free Motion Quilting Essentials. (I’m glad I got the Bluprint year when it was on sale. I tend to jump to what interests me or pertains to what I am working on.) This class is by Christina Cameli. Her style is gentle and guiding. I actually put her practice pieces together, which I’m sure upped my cutting and piecing skills. Sadly, it was another way to use time instead of just getting to work. PLUS, I had gone to Joann’s for the fabric to make something I liked instead of totally from the stash, thinking I will do something with them, like hang them. She cut the last piece and the computers went down. There was a checkout line, waiting for the registers to come back up, so I left my pieces with the clerk, and went to the grocery store next door. When I returned, the store was closed!
It was a couple of days before I was in that area again, but they still had them. Yay! (In the meantime, I started on another practice quilt, but I’ll save that story for another time!)
Somewhat related, we’ve needed to pick up the kid a couple of times lately due to not feeling well. The surprise pick up this week was another due to weather, but not snow or ice! The power went out. We had warnings of high wind possibly causing outages, but I was surprised anyway since I hadn’t noticed particularly bad wind that morning and I had been on the road. The text from the school said, basically, “Power is out and we can’t feed kids and have not heat.” There was no option but to close. Our house was on, for a while. I picked up Indigo and two others. We went to the store, which had been my plan before this detour, then lunch. As I walked in the house, I noticed things on, normal things, like fish tank, light on sewing machine. Then they weren’t. Yep, that fast and with such timing, our electricity was off. Stayed off for almost 4 hours. Kid thought it was best day ever – so I’ll be turning off the internet more often!!
These are the project pieces for the class I mentioned above. Several identical sandwiches are made and with each set, the skills get more fine tuned and added to. As you can see, I still l have a few lessons/openings on this first set, but it has been fun. I knew the Ribbon Candy would be difficult for me (in the middle on the top and the large blue border on the bottom). I have several pages of attempts to doodle this one that still wander off the path. I tried telling myself “lazy S’s” on these and it seemed to help.
Fun practice, but come Monday, I am going to focus on the one I WANT to get done!
So, til next time, love you always,
Cathy
Busy Cat Studio 