Starting Over Again

I was quilting like a fool earlier in the month, trying to get comfortable with free motion quilting. I even bought a special bobbin case to see if that would help at all, and I didn't see any difference - ugh! After a few tries at that, I got a little fed up and moved on to other projects, which brings me to this post.

In my bee, we have a UFO (unfinished fabric object) challenge that I had to open my big mouth and start. The goal is to randomly work on a UFO (I stole the idea from Jen) and keep the pressure on each other to get it finished. The prolific online quilters do one UFO a month, but aren't so big on the pressure thing (they are however, very big on the cheering when someone gets one done, which is nice). Our bee is not quite so prolific, so we decided to do one per quarter. So far, mine have been two small projects, a wall hanging and a christmas stocking (the cross stitch was done, just had to make it into a stocking). This quarter's UFO is a former mystery quilt that was supposed to look somewhat like this when it went together...

I didn't like the layout at all, so I experimented with a few different layouts, and even went so far as to sew the blocks into rows, but I was never quite happy with it. In the end, and with the assistance of my mom, I decided that the blue in the "plus" blocks was just too dominant, so off they came. My mom was nice enough to rip them out for me one day when she didn't have anything else that was occupying her hands. So, then I was left with 12 churn dash blocks and didn't know what to do with them. In January, we had an excellent speaker at our guild meeting, Sharyn Craig, who told us just what to do with orphaned blocks and how to rework a quilt so that you actually like the outcome. I was very inspired and came home that night and decided to add strips to the outside of the blocks to highlight the colors in them that I like, mainly the blue polka dot, which was supposed to be my focus fabric, but didn't get enough attention in the other layout. So, tonight, I got back to them and finished up a few blocks with a new sashing fabric. I like the result so far and plan to do a few more yellows and a few of the fabrics in the bottom right.

I don't know if I will use the strong coral color, because I think I only have enough of it for one block and it might stand out too much. Don't know what will happen with the blocks when they are all added onto, as it will be a little too big for a wall quilt and a little too small for a lap quilt...I guess that will have to be Part 2 of this story!