Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Making lemons from lemonade - WIP Wednesday

Today was my first opportunity to sew since last week.  I figured it was high time I did something about my Bee Happy quilt, especially since it was supposed to be completed last Sunday.  Ironically, this was the only project this year that I started early, with the intention of being the first in the group to complete!  That obviously did not happen!  With deadlines, whooshing past me, I decided I better put my frustration aside and get it quilted with Big Brother.  Unfortunately, he had other plans.....
"P" is for Pissed Off!
I would be zooming along with my loopy-loop stitching and then all of a sudden, the above would happen.  Soon, I had a mountain of thread trying to figure out what was going wrong.
Yes, I had to take a picture of this.  It is actually about half the thread that I had in the trash.
Finally, I figured out that he would accept some stitching through the appliques, as long as it wasn't an area that had appliques on the bottom also.  So, I marked the top using painters tape to show the areas where the appliques were on the bottom.
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It sounded simple enough = avoid these areas, at least until Ms. Kitty returns (presumably fixed)!  However, Big Brother still didn't like spending too much time on the top appliques.  If I did more than one loop before getting back to the background, he protested.  An hour and a half of sewing later, I am now half done with the quilt (I started at a third done).

To add to the frustration, I KNOW I am not doing my best work.  My stitch sizes are very inconsistent (versus my usual average amount), in part because I feel like I have to hurry over the appliques to get back to the background, and in part because of all the stops and starts I have to do every time he protests.  Let's not even discuss all the ripping out of stitches and the small holes it leaves in the appliques.

I feel very badly because sick people deserve nice quilts too.  I know they don't expect perfection, but this quilt is so far from that, I'm sure it will end up in the trash instead of a hospital.  I hate giving up, but I think if I had an extra week, I would be tempted to start all over again with another design.  I have until Saturday to get it done and in the mail.  Ms. Kitty is supposed to be ready Thursday afternoon.  Doesn't give me a whole lot of time!

Back to trying to make lemons from lemonade.....



Completed Projects:
  • Are you kidding me?
On-going Projects:
  • Hands2Help Bee Happy Quilt - quilting in progress 
  • Red, White, Blue New York Beauty - piecing in progress
  • Urban Nine Patch - just blocks for my 3 x 6 Bee, they are cut and ready to be put together
  • Urban Nine Patch Tablerunner
Back Burner:

  • New York Beauty Quilt A Long - actually different from the one above.
  • Batik Stripe Quilt - still sandwiched and ready to be quilted!
  • Thank you quilt for Ashley's teacher - due second week of June!  Plenty of time, right?
  • Lincoln quilt - need to put the borders on this baby and finish it up.
  • Blue & White Stack-n-Whack for May UFO challenge 


This week's stats:
Completed projects - 0
New projects - 0
Currently in Progress - 4

Linking up with Freshly Pieced WIP Wednesday's


WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced

1 comment:

  1. I think most people don't notice stitch quality unless they are sewers themselves, or maybe seriously OCD people, LOL. Everyone's eyes will be drawn to the pretty butterfiles, and once you wash the quilt it will hide the stitching even more, no worries! It sucks when you have troubles like that though, I've been there many times!

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