Instructive

Let's just be clear about something right up front: Mike had a much worse day yesterday than I did. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, we had to make a second trip to the doctor's office in order for him to have his colonoscopy (I might as well say it since everyone already knows what I'm talking about). Even after spending nearly a full 24 hours with the prep, they weren't able to do it. Now...I'm not going to crack wise about what this says about the "content" of Mike's character, but you can do the math as well as I can. Here's a hint though: it's a geometry problem related to volume. So...we're rescheduled in another two weeks. This time they'll give him the "Ajax" prep...you know, the one that cleans like a white tornado. (Please tell me you're old enough to get that reference.)

During our at-home interlude, I went to work trimming the first section for Calendula Patterdrip's Cottage. Here, I ran into a significant problem. As a reminder, here's the completed embroidery section:

Meg Hawkey gives instructions in her patterns to make a freezer paper template for trimming. Iron it to the piece, and then trim the excess around the edges. It's a good idea. I don't always do it, but...as an example...the embroidered blocks for Pieces of the Past are off-center when they're trimmed, and so the freezer paper template is insurance against disaster. I felt the same way about this Calendula Patterdrip piece, and so I made the template, ironed it on and whoops...well, that's a problem. 

There was no way I could fit the whole piece into the length of the freezer paper. So, what gives? And so I looked at the pattern cover, and I could see that the embroidery extended into the pieced block to its left. WTF?

So I read over and over the instructions several times, trying to figure out where I'd gone wrong. And, clearly, the last step in this section says to add the pieced blocks to the end to complete the section!

Oh my. That is purrplexing.

Certainly it's beyond my compurrehension.

Okay. So, I figure this has to be a mistake in the pattern. So I check the Crabapple Hill website where pattern corrections are, and I find nothing. So, then I write an email to Crabapple Hill. I was practicing extreme patience under the circumstances of the day, and so I was nice when I told them I thought there was an error. Within an hour, I received a phone call, and a very nice woman went over all of it with me. We agreed, it didn't make sense. (Good customer service, by the way.) 

Well, what could I do but work with what I had. Certainly, I wasn't going to start over with the embroidery I'd just taken two weeks to stitch. So I made the two pieced blocks...a pinwheel...

and a 9-patch...

and then sewed them together, and to the left end of the now-trimmed embroidery section.

As for the trimming, I just eye-balled it looking at the pattern cover and decided where to cut it. I gave myself an extra half-inch or so, and then used a very tiny straight stitch on the end so the embroidery wouldn't come loose. Then, I pinned it . . .

and retraced the remainder of the tree branch. I'll stitch that up this morning.

Even if it doesn't match up when I trace in the rest of the tree on the blocks that follow, I can fudge the lines, and it will be fine.

Then...last night we were watching TV, and I couldn't get this out of my mind. Then, all of a sudden, I realized where I'd gone wrong. In my defense, I'll say I read all of the instructions before I started. It's a complicated quilt where the embroidery is concerned, because the large motifs extend across pieced blocks and run from edge to edge on the quilt. But right at the beginning...practically the first thing I read was this:

Doh! I'd completely forgotten that. And the pattern wasn't any help either. It confused me because you can see where the bottom of the motif is marked with a dotted line here:

I drew in the pencil line to make it easier for me to see when I did the original tracing. The tree is included on the rather large sheet of paper for the crows. Where it shows me the limit line, I got confused and thought I should add it from the get-go. Clear as mud, right? You're confused too, right? I mean...I'm old...and I'm probably demented (although, how would I know?). How can I be expected to actually follow instructions, even if I read them first? I rest my case. And just, FYI, I sheepishly wrote another email to Crabapple Hill last night to let them know that I was the dumb one in this whole scenario.

It would be nice if I could say today will be a better day, but we're going to the grocery store. The only good thing about today's grocery shopping excursion is that it is senior discount day, and I'm feeling more "senior" than usual today. Hopefully, no one will give me instructions while I'm there, because, obviously, I'm too old to follow instructions.

Finally, I'm linking up with December's 

Very soon, I'll start sewing the embroidered Snowflakes block into a quilt. I have a good idea for this, and so I'm excited to sew it into a finished quilt top.