Saturday, February 18, 2012

Fab Little Quilt Swap Progress . .

So, I've been working away at my Fab Little Quilt in little bits and pieces over the last few weeks. I'm running out of time, and ever time I've planned to work on this quilt lately, someone is sick or I'm sick or I decide to have a nap first and wake up 3 or 4 hours later with no more progress made . . . sigh. And now I'm stalling because I don't know where to go from here. So, after checking out my partner's photostream and favorites and galleries and thinking about my strengths as a sewist, I came up with these two sketches:
(nope, I can't take credit for the soldier at the bottom, but I wanted to include him. Its always nice when your son decides to take over your sketchbook . .. ) I thought my partner would prefer the one on the right, and I was correct. I bought a few new fabrics and pulled a bunch from my stash and ended up with this fantastic little pile here:
Then, I started making churn dash blocks. Have you ever made 3.5" unfinished (3" finished) churn dash blocks? They're fiddly. They require lots of precision and trimming and pinning and proper pressing. They took me about two weeks to finish, but I think they look great:
But now I was almost out of time, and my original quilt required about a dozen or more cup blocks, which are also fiddly and I was sick for 2 1/2 weeks and exhausted from teaching, and I started playing around with a simpler idea . .
So I made my teapot, and now I feel like I've hit a wall . . . do I want to make a cannister and two cups, like in the plan above? Or do I want to make a yellow bird teapot and some cups in vertical rows . .

And if I only want to make two or three teacups, then what do I do with all these fab fabrics I pulled to make teacups? I wanted to do 3 or 4 dainty cups with the little fabrics, and then some funky clunky mugs out of the bigger prints. But then how will I balance out the quilt?

What to do, what to do? So much pretty fabric, so many ideas, and only two more weeks until my mailing deadline, and not even a finished quilt top. Sigh, I'm usually more on the ball with these things, but I'm feeling a little lost and nervous of making something "too simple" or "not good enough" for this swap. I think I might just start making teacups and a teapot and a cannister and if I don't want them for this quilt when I'm done, I'll use them in a little quilt of my own. Thoughts, anyone?

1 comment:

Kristen said...

Oh my goodness, I just love that bird fabric - so cute! That being said, I think you need to go simpler and make the more recent sketch - the teapot looks fabulous and then you'd still get to make a couple of cute teacups for it and hopefully finish on time - either way, it's so cute!