Completion Depression

Finished the BabyStar on Sunday night and packed it up and gave it to the gal at work Monday morning. She was underwhelmed. It's always hard to give one away - they become like "children" in a sense, and I almost "miss" having them to work on.

The quilt came out wonderful (if I do say so myself, and I do)- it looked good, the thin orange outer "binding" border was perfect, and I took miniscule blind-stitches to secure it on the backside by hand, which came out teriffic. Yes, I'm blowing my own horn. I made countless errors on this thing - twisted thread loops, unhidden knots, and a score of poorly matched points - but for a first Compass, I'm content with it, and for a kiddie quilt that will likely get barfed on and all, I'm very OK with it.

No, the problem is the recipient, and I knew that one going in. But some things you just DO because it's the right thing to do, regardless of what is going to happen, and this was one of those things.

Now I just have the rest of the top of a quilt that a friend wanted me to piece for her (and now I know why... each square has about 45 pieces!) I'm chain-piecing the small bits for a whole row at a time and then mass ironing. It seems to go faster that way. I think I understand the psychological effect - if I do it one square at a time, each square is an "I'm finished" kind of feeling and I stop working. By doing all the small bits for a whole row at a time, I never get the "finished" feeling until there are squares made up for a whole row's worth - which is worth a day of "I'm Finished" kick-back-and-relax-and-watch-a-movie kind of sloth.

And you may ask yourself - why would I do something like that? Well, the trade-off in this situation is that she is going to quilt the rest of my daughter's long-long-long awaited quilt. I just can NOT quilt well in a hoop, and the daughter's quilt is 120 x 120 inches and too big for my frame.

Heh - BabyStar was too small for my frame, Manda's Pinwheels is too big. Go figure.

So she does the hand-quilting on my nemesis quilt, and I do the piecing on hers. It works. In the mean while, I will be looking for the strips of fabric I cut ages ago for the binding on Manda's. I'm not taking any pictures of Manda's Pinwheels until it's done, because it's just too big and awkward to work with at the moment. Suffice it to say it is a log-cabin done in shades of teal and cream and put together into pinwheels.

Ok - back to the sewing machine.