From Blocks to Top to Borders!

Yesterday just wore me out.

I had lots of questions about QuiltCam last night, but I didn’t even find them until after 10pm ---

The cleaning frenzy takes a physical toll.  But I feel so good with how much I’ve accomplished, and I’m continuing today with the coat closet.  By the time my two weeks is up at home, there will have been huge improvements made to make living easier in my castle.

There is a life lesson in this whole cleaning out thing, I know there is.  It is all stuff that was not noticeable by mere passersby---everything I am dealing with is behind closed doors and drawers, things that are hidden on the INSIDE ---How often to we see things on the outside and judge that everything is “fine”?

Just because things look fine on the outside doesn’t mean that there isn’t a struggle going on within.  I think this applies to us as people too.  We can never know what another person’s challenges are on the inside by just looking at how “normal” things appear on the outside.

And sometimes cleaning things out in our living spaces is a way to heal what is going on inside the deep drawers and closets of our inner selves too.

Okay, that’s enough deep thought for this morning! 

Yesterday after the cleaning chores were done, I set about making the 3 remaining blocks for the bow-tie top…I used 4 of the blues that were left in each of the 3 blocks needed so that gave me 12 already done.  I just had to make 15 more that were NOT blue!

And here it is all laid out before sewing it together:

I spent the rest of the day sewing the blocks into rows, and joining the rows to complete the quilt top….

Here it is on Barbie, all coming together!

And then I started to wonder --- what if??? 

Sometimes that “what if?” Is a good voice to listen to, sometimes it means more work just when you thought you were “DONE.”  But I wondered what this would look like bordered with randomly scrappy 9 patches in all the colors of the bow-tie blocks.

I pulled out my drawer of 2” leader/ender squares and just started randomly chain piecing, joining them to form a border --- no inner border, I just want the bow-ties to fade out into random chaos:

Like this!

It’s going to use up 684 2” squares to make the border ---a good dent in that box of 2” squares that is rather full.  That’s a win/win if you ask me! 

It just means that the quilt top won’t be ready for quilting for a while yet.  That’s fine!  One day at a time!

It was nice and quiet at home yesterday afternoon/evening and I just sewed while Netflix played episodes of “Hart of Dixie”  What a cute series!  I just felt like sewing without talking, so I hope you don’t mind that I took last night off after that 3 hour marathon sewing with QuiltCam on Saturday afternoon.  I just needed to unplug.

QuiltCam may not happen tonight either – I’ve got a bee meeting I’d really like to go to.  I haven’t seen some of these ladies in ages.  But we will do it again soon!