Wednesday 1 March 2017

What a drag!

I have been missing in action largely due to my Field Guide Quilt. As I have listed it with the FAL 2017 I felt that I needed to continue on this UFO.

Let me tell you...this was the most un-enjoyable exercise. I do not know what possessed me but I had decided to adorn this quilt with some more intense quilting, i.e. lines in every beige rectangle. While that seemed all very do-able, it nearly finished me off.

Here are the little rectangles...looking pretty harmless...
Some lines quilted...the problem was that I had gazillions of those rectangles! While persevering I must say...this was not enjoyable nor did it increase my skill level...in fact I started to become fairly sloppy in doing the lines because I just had enough. Nearly put the quilt away again because it was severely putting me behind in some of my other endeavours. Finally realised that I actually do not like quilting pieced quilts at all. Maybe a bit of a motif here and there or some allover design, but not this somewhat brainless repetition. For me, that just about killed all inspiration or enjoyment in finishing this quilt.

While I love FMQ, I love the blank canvass of a Wholecloth. Even though you also do a fair bit of repetition in a Wholecloth, it somehow feels different, as you are building a picture. This is missing for me in a pieced quilt, or maybe it was just this quilt. Nevertheless I forced myself to keep going, doing a few rectangles every night...looking at the quilt, I did not feel that I was making any progress at all! I started counting the rectangles in order to assure myself that I actually was making progress, but even that did not help as it appeared to be endless. In the end I gave up and just blindly stitched these rectangles at night...what a pain this was...
but, here it is, FINISHED!! ...only the binding left!
It is just a lap quilt and the work involved was obviously deceiving.

This will be my only finish for the FAL2017 First Quarter as I am now seriously behind in everything else. Washed some fabric today though, itching to get going on another Wholecloth!

Karin

3 comments:

  1. Oh boy, I feel for you! I just finished my first large quilt that I quilted all by myself and it seemed like it took forever! I'm going to stick with smaller quilts until I get faster at it. A sincere YAHOO to you for this finish! Now back to something enjoyable!

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  2. I so admire your perseverance as if I remember correctly you partially quilted it before and then took that out because you didn't like it? But I do think the quilting makes this quilt, the combination of the orange peels and dense straight line do work very well. But as you say not your first love but now onward and upward to the next whole cloth....

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  3. I am glad you were able to stick to it and get this monkey off your back. It really is a very pretty quilt, I hope you grow to like it a lot now that it is finished. And you get to move onto other projects now.

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