You Know That Time...

I did something really stupid today. I was working on sewing blocks for the pink background quilt in my last post. I had more HST's left, but no more room on the design wall, so I did some figuring and decided if I set the quilt four blocks by six blocks, I would only be six HSTs short. I knew I had no yardage of the pink left, but I raided my scrap user system and found some squares I could make the correct size HSTs from. I made those and started assembling blocks. After a bit I counted my finished blocks and the blocks still on the design wall, decided I had miscounted the first time, and I would be a block short. After much deliberating, I figured out a way to make one more block worth of HSTs with a different background color and just have it look like a design element and not just look weird. I made the extra units, and when I refigured it all out, turns out I was correct the first time, and didn't need the extra units after all! UGH! So much wasted time! Someone please tell me I'm not the only ditzy quilter out there!

Not only did I do some stupid stuff today, I found mistakes this week that I made a few years ago. 

One of these corners is not like the others, and I found two different blocks I made this same mistake on! I did the necessary frogging (rippit, rippit), and it's all fixed now. I have this quilt sewn into rows now, I just need to sew the rows to each other to have that quilt center done. This UFO is going to grandson Mr. L, as I'd rather finish a UFO to give him right now than have a new start, and he's happy with this one. 

I did have one quilt finish this week. A few years ago I made a quilt for DS the Elder in all Australian fabrics. He went to Australia for three months several years ago and LOVED it! I had some extra Australian fabric after making his quilt, and I liked the fabric in the big blocks of the Garden Path quilt pattern so much, I made as many more blocks as I could from the leftover fabric. Thus Aussie 2 was started. I pinbasted this quilt about two years ago, then life got crazy, so it never got quilted. Finally, it is a finished quilt!

It was pretty windy the day I took this pic, and the quilt is 96x110", so not small by any means. DS the Elder's quilt is 112" square, because his has one more row and his border is a little bigger. This quilt is huge considering it was made from leftovers. This quilt used every bit of leftover border fabric, and I only have some misc. strips of Aussie fabric in my scrap user system, yardage has been busted!

I managed quilting this quilt with my bum arm by setting a timer for one hour, and I would only quilt one hour per day. Of course having the sit down longarm makes it much easier to deal with huge quilts, and the quilt suspension system was also helpful to keep the strain off of my arm. I did do additional sewing on the days I quilted, but nothing where I was dealing with huge heavy quilts. 

So what's next? I'm still working on wedding quilts, as none of those are finished. I have two into quilt tops, and I hope to get those pin-basted in early July. Once I have them basted, I can work on quilting them one hour at a time, the same way I did Aussie 2. 

I am piecing a wedding quilt as my main project, and assembling a couple other quilts as leaders/enders. Sometimes I just need to look at something different for a little while, and if I can assemble a UFO into a quilt top instead of starting something new and still get that feeling of change, so much the better.