Excuse the crappy iPhone photo.I started cutting everything out and sewing squares together back in February, but then put it on hold for a few months to rearrange half my house, (seemingly), in order to move my office/craft room upstairs to a big empty room instead of cramped into one of our front bedrooms.
In May I finally started work back on it again, and in one week it went from this little pile of squares to a much larger pile of squares, to being put together and 1/4 of the way quilted.
This picture was taken before pinning the layers together and quilting.
And then I go so stinkin' sick of looking at the thing that I couldn't bear to work on it anymore.
Plus, you would never think that sewing could be so physically demanding, but I'm telling you my shoulders and arms were so sore from trying to strong arm that quilt through the machine to do free-motion quilting. To top it off, the more I looked at the quilt the more I didn't like it. I was getting to the point where I hated it and thought it looked absolutely terrible.
So I decided to take a little break from the big quilt to try and get some perspective.
Because I was tired of looking at the all neutral colors quilt with about 11 spools of thread worth of beige stitching, I decided to go in the complete opposite direction and make a little, (i.e. extremely doable and not overwhelming), baby quilt for some friends of ours' who are expecting a baby boy.
I had so much fun picking out all the "boy fabrics" and making little pinwheels and stitching everything together with bright blue thread. This taking a break from the big "boring" quilt, sure was a good idea. ;) It was way more fun to look at sharks and rocket ships, tigers and elephants and zebras and baseballs. The baby boy quilt was moving right along at record pace...
And then we went on our camping trip and I spent a week teaching VBS and it totally threw off my groove.
To top it off, one of the quilting blogs I read, P.S. I Quilt, had announced a quilt along that I thought sounded like loads of fun. The two quilts I already had in progress were from quilt alongs that were on blogs months ago, so while I was following all the directions I didn't have the fun of doing it along with lots of other people. Plus, by participating as the quilt along was happening, I would have deadlines, so hopefully it wouldn't take me 4 months to finish!
So, I decided it sounded like too much fun to pass up participating, and ordered some fabric for my synchronized squares quilt along. In this fabric set:
Pretty stinkin' cute if I do say so myself! I think it's going to be super fun on our guest bed at Christmas time. All my fabric arrived last week, and on Friday I got the first step, (cutting squares and making binding), done.
If you're keeping track that's now 3 quilting projects I have going on simultaneously. Oy.
My goal for this week is to finally finish the quilting on the behemoth quilt, pick a backing for the baby boy quilt, and keep on track with the synchronized square quilt along.
I guess it'll definitely keep me from getting bored with one project by working on it for too long! I would like to get at least one of these wrapped up soon though! haha
Jennifer
