Is it Wednesday? I'm having trouble keeping up.
The Husband has attempted a trip to his office today, and I am alone in the house for the first time in more than a week. The roads are terrible. Out in the boonies where I live, there's no chance of having a road crew come by with a snow plow or salt. The Husband drove my Wrangler to work, thinking it would be more stable than his 4 x 4 truck. He will be in trouble if he wrecks my Jeep. ;)
Today I am trying to finish a quilt top I started for my granddaughter more than a year ago. I finished the blocks some time ago. Yesterday, I sewed the blocks together in strips. Today, the plan is to sew the strips together.
I should kick myself for attempting this pattern, and then I should kick myself again for the way I decided to assemble the blocks.
My first mistake was to let the granddaughter pick one piece of fabric around which I would build the entire quilt. She picked a diagonal stripe, shades of blue and green, interspersed with black. At first glance, the colors appear neon, but when viewed individually, the colors are actually more pastel. I had a devil of a time picking out coordinating fabrics.
What to do with the stripe presented another challenge. Certainly, the fabric would make a nice border, but I wanted something a little more imaginative. I ended up cutting triangles out of the striped fabric and re-assembling them into squares. This was mistake #2. No matter how you slice them, triangles will have a bias edge. Bias edges stretch. It takes 4 triangles to make the block I envisioned; this quadruples the stretch problem. It was a royal pain in the ass to cut those triangles so that the colors would match up, and that black stripe in the fabric makes every little mis-matched seam scream "look at me!" My measuring/cutting/sewing skills were not quite up to the task.
For the alternating blocks, I chose a version of a log cabin pattern. In case you don't know, log cabin patterns are made up of one square and a bunch of skinny strips. They can be assembled in various ways. I chose to assemble them so that, if I chose my colors correctly, they would have a 3-D effect. I thought that this 3-D effect, coupled with the eye-crossing striped blocks, would look kind of cool. If you're counting, this was mistake #3. The more pieces a quilt block has, the bigger the chance that the assembled block will be "wonky." Generating multiple blocks of exactly-matching size is above my pay grade.
But I pressed on.
By last summer, I had built all 50 of the blocks. I pinned them to a big piece of quilt batting, and the next time the granddaughter came over, I was excited to show her how the quilt was going to look when the blocks were sewn together.
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The look on her face made it obvious that she did not like the quilt. She ended up confessing (for the first time) that what she really wanted was a Marvel Comics superhero quilt. We'll talk about that later. I decided I'd keep the quilt for myself.
Mistake #4 was deciding to turn the blocks "on point" so that they presented as diamonds instead of squares. To get the effect I wanted, every log cabin block had to be turned in the same direction, with the light-colored square at the bottom of the block. I can't tell you how many times I sewed a log cabin block upside-down in the strips. Turning the blocks on point meant that the outer edges of the quilt were jagged, and I have to cut more triangles to fill the jags.
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