Quiltin'-a-long

Just because I haven't been here, posting my little heart out, doesn't mean that I haven't been busy.

'Cause I have. Been real busy. Been real real busy. Wanna see?

I joined this.



And, in true-to-me fashion, I started late. A couple of weeks late. Which means I killed myself last week trying to get caught up.

First I picked my fabrics. And let me just say that I am sooooooo proud of my little fabric-hoarding self for finally cutting into it. The quilt-a-long calls for 12 half-yard cuts of fabric, and guess how many little half-yard cuts of Anna Maria goodness (er, I mean "Good Folks") were in that little stack? Oh yeah, 12, baby. Exactamundo. And, of course, I had been hoarding that little stack for quite a few months, with no plans whatsoever of what I wanted to make with it. So it only made sense to force myself to use it.



So I cut. And cut and cut and cut and cut, until it was all in nice little 2.5" strips.



And then I sewed. I sewed and sewed and sewed those strips together until I was sick in the head. I'm not always a perfectionist, but because I was using up all of my AMH goodness, of course, I wanted to make sure and make the strips random, but perfectly planned-out random (if there is such a thing) so the whole finished quilt would appear somewhat uniform. So I made myself crazy trying to keep track of what color combinations I had done each time.



Then it was time to cut the sewn strips into big blocks. I made myself crazy with the blue marking pencil trying to get those stupid blocks exactly 12.5" square, but I somehow managed.

Since nothing is ever as easy as you think, then all 42 blocks needed to be arranged on the floor into just the right configuration. I didn't want any of the blocks to match up with the same fabric patterns in the intersections of each 4-block grouping. Oh yeah, I'm that anal. But it really is that organized of a quilt. And by golly, all my seams match up almost perfectly, thanks to my occasional bout of crafter's OCD.



Are you still with me? You are? Really? Haha, just kidding.

Each horizontal row had to be sewn together, and I marked each one with a post-it note pinned on to remember which one was the 1st row, the 2nd, etc. That only took about a year.

And finally I sewed all of the rows together into a quilt top.



Whew. That was a whole lotta stinkin' labor. Not even kidding.

I will be skipping the quilting part, myself, and paying someone with a long-arm machine to quilt it for me. There ain't no way I'm even going to attempt to push that beast through my little sewing machine, nothankyou. Right now this quilt pretty much stands as the biggest quilt I've made to date, and I can't believe I'm even saying this, but I think I'm gonna have to make it a smidge bigger, just in case I want to ever put it on the guest room bed or somethin'. It's currently about 72" by 84". A border all the way around it would give it a nice drape on the full-size bed in our guest room. It's awfully bright color-wise, so I don't know if it will ever really be placed on that bed, but maybe just for fun every once in a while. I have enough strip pieces left over to make two matching shams if I've a mind to, so I'll probably force myself to plod on and get this sucker ready for quilting before it gets put back in a pile for a year or two unfinished. Not that I ever do that sort of thing. Cough, cough...

Yeah, it's bright, but I sure do like it. I've got to come up with a name for it, I suppose, something better than "This dang quilt took stinkin' forever to make"...