Pro-craft-ination

 I've been doing things, just not what I should be doing. It would have been nice if I had finished the table toppers for the rally this week,  but at least progress was made. All of them are basted, two of them are even quilted. They need to be finished before November 11,  so I still have time, right???

One of my grandsons really wants a space-themed quilt for his birthday in November. Yesterday I finally started dealing with that.  I cut the panel I'm starting with to size, evaluated how much of each fabric I have and realistically looked at how much time I have. I spent yesterday afternoon with EQ8, and came up with an easy quilt to make up, only ten blocks to piece then lots of wide borders to show off the space fabrics I splurged on. It's definitely not my usual style, but it's the best chance I have of getting the quilt done on time. Finished is better than perfect.

I would have preferred using an orange as the border around the panel instead of that teal, but this particular grandson is not an orange fan. I auditioned several blues and they all fell flat. I tried a lime green like in the last border and there just isn't enough lime green on the other fabric to make it look right. There is more contrast in real life than in the photo, but after looking at the photo on my computer screen instead of on my phone, I think I'll audition a gold and a purple fabric before I cut that first border. He's not a yellow fan either, so maybe I'll just audition purple.  I hope to make final selections and cut at least all the borders today. The outside border is from a border print that I've already fussy cut down into border strips. This grandson's favorite color is pink, and I had three space prints with a lot of pink. One of them had satellites and such in too large a scale to use in a border.  The other was mostly stars in a galaxy type print, but Mr. LJ prefers planets, so I opted to use the planet fabric. I think I'll make him a pillowcase out of the galaxy fabric, plus use it in the star blocks I'll be making.

So what have I been doing with most of my time? Working on UFO's. I have a scary amount of UFO's at block stage, needing to be assembled. In the last week I've sewn eight quilts into rows. Only one of those had the rows sewn together.

The nice thing is, none of the quilts I'm in the middle of assembling need borders, so once I get all the rows sewn together, I'll have a stack of new quilt tops for the quilting queue. (Not that I didn't already have plenty in the quilting queue ;-) 

I'm not often in the mood to assemble a bunch of quilts, so when the mood strikes, I try to run with it even when I should be doing other things. 

Yesterday while designing the space quilt I was feeling less than "stellar", and this morning I found out why. Turns out I have covid. This is my fourth time having Covid, and I've had really mild cases each time, and I'm hoping that holds true this time. Since DH works in a hospital I'm probably lucky I've only caught it once a year. I think in the last four years the only time I was sick besides covid is when I caught a stomach bug from space quilt grandson! This is definitely the longest stretch I've ever gone without a cold. 

I'll just keep doing what I can, when I can. I work pretty well under pressure, so I'm not too worried about getting things done at this point. I think I can probably do it.