Friday, February 25, 2011

Cabin Fever in (un)Progress

Last week or so, I posted my latest in-progress quilt.  It's a wonky log cabin made from scraps of other sewing projects. I spent many of our snow days putting this together and therefore dubbed it, "Cabin Fever". When I got the sashing finished, I was pretty happy with it despite the fact that it got considerably thinner from top to bottom.  "It's wonky!" I told myself. "I love wonky!"  However, the more I looked at that impossibly askew quilt, the less wonky it became and the more I realized it was just bad.


Now I suppose if I were truly the liberated quilter I aspire to be, I'd have added an even wonkier and wilder border to balance out the rest. But I haven't gotten to that point just yet. The perfectionist in me just couldn't take that what I had wasn't really a wonky quilt top, but a poorly executed one. And every time I'd walk into the sewing room, I'd stop, look at it, and get aggravated with myself for making such a mess of it. The photo really doesn't show just how off it was, but trust me, there were several inches difference in the top and bottom and no amount of trimming was going to square it up without cutting into the log cabins.

I took it too my BOTM meeting last Saturday and the ladies there agreed that something needed to be done. I got several suggestions, but the one that I thought would work out best was just to cut the thing apart and start all over.

So that's what I did. Rather than lose all the white sashing I decided to trim the blocks leaving one half to an inch of the white surrounding the block. Would've liked to leave more, but there just wasn't enough. I've surrounded half the blocks in Kona medium gray and have started framing the rest in Kona ash.  So I don't know that I've made progress on this quilt since my last post, so much as I've made unprogress. Still, it has taught me to slow down and be more mindful of what I'm doing...at least when adding sashing.




I think I'm going to be much happier with it now.

4 comments:

Pétra said...

Great solution! I can't wait to see how it turns out but I am sure it will only be wonky in the right way.

Anonymous said...

Hi Kellie, I haven't visited for a while. Nice to see what you've been doing all winter....
Love what you've done and glad you're happier with it now. Nothing worse then all that work and then not liking it.

Patty said...

I LOVE the new version, Kellie!!

C. Michele said...

Oh, I love it! It looks great!