Bass-ackwards - 7/25/18

This morning on social media, I saw a post that said something like, "If there's a way to do something wrong, I'll find it."  It made me think about the quilt on my sewing table right now.

There's going to be a wedding in our family in a couple of months.  As I pondered what wedding present to get the couple, I remembered a partially-completed quilt top in a box in my sewing room.  I started this quilt several years ago.  The design is called "Brilliant Cut," referring to the cut of a diamond, which I thought was a mighty appropriate pattern for a wedding gift quilt.  It may be the most complex pattern I've ever attempted.  I worked on it, hot and heavy, for a time, way back when,  then some other project caught my interest, and I put the quilt away.  Monday afternoon I dragged the box out to see how far I'd gotten and whether it would be possible to finish the quilt by the wedding date.

Digging through the box, I found that I'd completed eight of the 16" Brilliant Cut blocks.  Four more blocks just needed one final seam to set the round blocks into their background squares, and these were already pinned and ready to sew.  I finished those in nothing flat.

However....

(There's always a "however.")

It will take more than twelve of the 16" blocks to make a good-sized quilt.  Way back when I was originally working on this quilt, I had already decided that there was no way I'd ever finish enough of those blocks to make a big quilt.  I had found a simpler pattern - some type of star pattern - to make blocks to combine with the Brilliant Cut blocks to create a king-sized quilt.  The star blocks included  four-patch blocks situated in the corners in such a way as to create an Irish Chain pattern between the stars and the diamonds.  In the box, there were four completed star blocks and enough already-cut triangles, squares, and polygons to make 9 more.  I went to work.

The problem was that I'd not saved the instructions for assembling the star blocks.  I'd saved a picture of the block and could refer to the the already-completed blocks, but it still took a good bit of guess-work to figure out which way to turn the triangles, and on which side of the polygons they should be sewn.  I made a lot of bad guesses and had to un-sew a lot of seams.  In the process, some of the little triangles and polygons became distorted, and I had to cut new ones.  In short (too late for that?), this project was not nearly as far along as I'd thought, and finishing this quilt top is not going to be the piece of cake I thought it would be.

And then it'll need quilting.

Anyone want to place bets on whether there'll be a finished quilt in time for a September wedding?  ;)