The Hurrier I Go

(image source)

When my class in Vancouver started, I was already feeling under the gun...procrastinating on housework, needing to repot the tomatoes, so many projects on the go...I blame the Quiltmaker's Garden. Hasn't it been responsible for all the ills in my life for the past five years? There I was quilting away, and still, it refuses to be finished.

So the class is over now. Each time I take it, I absorb just a little more. This time, I was pretty much left alone unless I asked for help or suggestions. There were beginners in the class, and they needed more of the instructor's attention. I was actually thankful to fade into the background and be left to work on my own for the most part. Here's where the project stands now.

After I took that photo, I took a good look at the beak on the pink bird. Some back-up explanation is helpful here, I think. Ann reminded us several times that we're making quilts, not photographs. Sometimes what appears in the photograph doesn't necessarily work in the quilt. If you look at the photograph below, you can see that I've pieced the beak on the pink bird pretty much as it appears in the photograph.

Nevertheless, it looked funny to me, and so I switched out two pink pieces for two black pieces, and I think it looks better now.

Now I have the whole project home in my own sewing room, and I've spent some time studying the orange bird. I'm a little bothered by the one triangular piece indicated in the image below. If you look at the photograph, again, it's hard to say whether that piece is beak or bird. I'm going to try switching out that one piece and see if it's an improvement. I can always put it back if it isn't.

By the time we were finished yesterday, my brain was absolute mush. When I'd taken it to this point, I could not cut another piece. I could not make another fabric choice. I was done. Ann looked at me and said I looked "brain dead." My thought: Thanks for noticing. Now I'm going home.

And, hey! Now I am home! Yay! There's so much to do here today. I absolutely must do some housework...but not too much. It's important to pace yourself, you know. Wouldn't it be just awful if I ran out of housework to do? Catastrophic, really. The top priority today, however, is to repot the tomatoes into their largest pots of the season. I don't want them to get any taller before doing that because they can get too hard to work with. My arms are only so long, you know. When those things are done, I can get back to some sewing.

Yesterday I had some time to kill before it was time to take off for my class, and so I cut some strips to make the Rainbow Scrap Challenge blocks for the month. I'm also catching up on the purple blocks of February this month. Here are May's pink strips. 

I'll cut the February's purples next, and then I'll get back to work on the Rainbow Jubilee quilt. If you've forgotten about this project (and there's no reason why you should remember it), it's this one.

The black strips are already cut, mercifully, and so I can get to work sewing those together too. I'm kind of excited to add some more colors to this quilt and get a better idea how it's going to look.

And there are other projects I want to work on...finishing the next row for the Shop Hop quilt, for example. And I'd like to make another block for Tuxedo Tales, since I'm trying to keep up with that one month-by-month. And then, there's that troublemaker quilt, Quiltmaker's Garden. I'm determined to finish it by month's end.

So there you go...the hurrier I go...trying to get caught up. Time's a wastin.