I’ve been busy today. I made little treats for little people in my life for Valentine’s Day. If the rain lets up (yes, we’re still here and not washed away) I’ll trot over to the Post Office and mail them off. I had already made two little treats for two little boys who lived nearby, and felt like I should finish some for the rest.
The babies, who don’t have pillows yet, will have to wait until the next round.
I was ready for a new Christmas Quilt. So one day in October, when I had twenty minutes free of grading, I thought about what I wanted, and really really thought I could get it done by December 1st. So I cut out a bunch of patches, and sewed up this square.
Ick.
Then the grading kicked in, Christmas fol-de-rol arrived and the patches still sat on the cutting mat.
This whole time I’ve had this patch up on the pin wall, and have thought, well. No.
Here I spent all this money on this fabric and I hate the quilt. I remember evaluating dresses I was making in high school, hating them all, thinking why did I waste my time on this? And then I remember my mother saying to me that you can’t judge the success or failure of a sewn outfit until you get the hem in. Of course, she’s right. She’s my mother. So obviously I can’t judge a quilt by one block.
Another factor in the design was my push-back against one-patch quilts–simple designs I see all over the web on my blogs. Quilts used to be about the grid and the geometric-ness of it, if I can make up that word. Then the art quilt hit, and people left the grid behind and certainly the quilt world is better for it. I love many of them.
And the current craze of one-patch or simple designs I think is a result of the large-scale design on a piece of fabric–a design that would just not look good cut up into teensy squares/triangles/rectangles and then sewn back together.
But when I glance at a bed, while I like the large-scale prints and the simple designs, I still long to see something more traditional and perhaps more elaborate, a secondary design that might percolate up from the first blocks placed together. So I got out my trusty-dusty quilt block book, which is simply pages of flannel interspersed with paper. It allows me to plan out a block in a portable form.
Four blocks done. I like how it’s coming along. I no longer believe it will be done quickly–it takes some planning and sewing time–but I think I’ll have it done by this Christmas. Maybe.
I’ve been working on this quilt for too long. I’m really tired of it, but I can’t stop now as I spent a gank of money on the fabric and don’t want to just put it up on the shelf. Besides I know I’ll like it when it’s done. I hope.
When I was in grad school and slogging through the writing of my novel, it feel like sometimes I was being tortured, one paragraph at a time. There’s days when even though you are sure you’re writing The Great American Novel, it’s all just too much. I wanted short stories! Poems! Essays! Anything that had a page count of less than twenty pages.
And now? I want to make a baby quilt! A lap quilt! Anything with a block count of less than twenty blocks.
