Sew-cation!

Ah, bliss. I have to use up some vacation time and decided to take a week off.

I started with a plan but decided on Monday morning of that week to chuck it—the project I thought I was going to work on was not speaking to me in a good way at all. I gifted the baby quilt to my neighbors…and in my excitement completely forgot to get a proper photo of it. This is the last photo I took of it, just before I buried the threads and hand sewed down the binding:

I have 2 project bins in the studio—21 and 23. I pulled out the IMT Egyptian Pyramids quilt (started circa 2005) and threw it up on the design wall. Hmm…

Then Hubs had to throw in his opinion:

And this was the intended border print:

…and it really wasn’t flowing with this. Another hot mess. What I had envisioned did not equate what was on the design wall. 16 years will do that to you. 

Jack was here on Sew-cation Tuesday to work on our collaboration project (more on this in another post). Bin 23 had the One Block Wonder quilt project I started in a class in 2009. As luck would have it, the colors of the OBW were the same as the pyramids. Jack suggested that the pyramids border the OBW. 

After Jack left at the end of our day on Tuesday, I immediately cut out the rest of the triangles for the OBW, and spent the rest of the week piecing hexagons. By Saturday morning I had all the block-halves done and started putting them on the design wall.

As an aside, I love most of the OBWs I see and have bought at least 3-4 fabrics to make more. I realized this week I may not want to make another OBW. That’s ok; that means I have something for other projects or backings. Glass half-full.

So at the end of Sew-cation, this is what we have:

Gosh, I surely do want to retire. Or take at least another week off from work. 

I’ll keep you posted on progress. And as I told one of my girlfriends, “Progress is progress, even if there’s no finished project.”

The week since Sew-cation brought me into the infinite loop of trying to decide how to proceed forward. When chatting with Cindy this weekend I explained how what I had started years ago I didn’t necessarily want to finish now, and feels like obligation sewing. My tastes have changed, and now I have a fabulous stash of fabrics that I don’t necessarily want to use. I thought I was building my retirement nest. While I could wait until my tastes change to come back around to again loving mud, that fabric is taking up a lot of valuable real estate. It’s not lost on me that some of my stash comes from estate sales from the families of dearly departed quilters that also had the idea that they needed it all, but didn’t live long enough to quilt it all. 

Seize the day (and the fabric), peeps! Sew it up, or re-home it. 

Go make!