Well I definitely have to bind and send the two memory quilts soon. I’m just finding them so emotionally difficult to work on. I get a burst of speed and move along for awhile, but feel emotionally drained after a big step, and seem to want a mental break. If Jess had asked for just one, I think I would have sent it by now. But two just makes everything feel so big. I really should just jump over to trimming those down and binding them today, and yet I feel not ready to do it.
Meanwhile, there’s the Have a Heart top…
I made it back in May 2020. I had just done 2 ‘buy-nothing’ quilt tops for Edel in a swap, and was on a roll. I used scraps for the heart, but for the background I used a linen/cotton blend bedsheet that I had on hand. (It was May 2020, I wasn’t going to Joann’s!) The sheet is incredibly soft, as it had been laundered many times. The kinda linen softness where it feels like velvet. So nice, but it’s also a bit more ‘wodgie’ than quilting cotton. It has sat around since then. I assumed it was lap/throw size, so I bought a package of Twin size batting to finish it, but it’s actually bigger than that. I do have backing, and I would LOVE to get this out of the WIP pile, but I’m worried that even if I go get bigger batting, it might be too big to comfortably move through my domestic machine. Now I’m trying to decide if I should finish it myself, or if I should send it out to be long armed.
I mean, it is a Covid quilt, so the ‘I Can Make Anything out of Paperclips and Dryer Lint’ part of me wants to finish it without help, with just whatever I have on hand. Pandemic-make-do-quilt! And I do have large scraps of the exact same batting that I just cut off the other 3 projects I quilted. I could piece the batting to make it bigger. And I could go for a big risk, and try quilting it on my machine with a walking foot so I’m not struggling so much to drag it through free-motion style.
And then there’s ‘Perfectionist Hermione-Granger Jennie’ who says “What if that’s a huge mistake??? What if it comes out awful and Prof. McGonagall comes to take your sewing machine away for being a crappy quilter, and you have to live with untalented Muggles for the rest of your days?!?!”
Then there’s ‘Fu@&-it Jennie’ who is sitting there pushing me to jump. “What have you got to lose? They’re scraps. If it comes out awful, it can go in the back of the cupboard, and you can let Ada puke all over it or build forts with it, or take it to the park to get grass stained.”
