I'm not going to go into my eventful year. Bits of it may come up in future posts, and it isn't as if it was SO eventful that I didn't have the odd half an hour to devote to blogging. I'll just tell you about my latest project and see if it spurs me into putting on my water wings.
Last year, for grandson #1's birthday in May, I promised to make him a quilt to go on his new bed. We drew a picture of it as we were eating in the pub and decided what colours it would be and the basic design of it. I lost the piece of paper, inevitably, and when we finally got around to choosing fabrics together (at Abakhan in Preston) he chose quite different fabrics from the colours we had originally talked about. That was probably in September. I duly preshrank the fabrics and then they sat accusingly in the sewing room waiting to be dealt with. The most fun part of quilting, I find, is choosing the fabrics and thinking about how you will put them together. Everything after that; the drawing round shapes, the cutting out, the stitching the elements together, the quilting, the binding, is tedium. Granted it's sometimes pleasant tedium- if you're in that mindset where a bit of mindless activity frees you up to think about other things whilst still being a bit productive- but sometimes, the unremitting repetition of sewing one triangle to another, in this case 108 of them, puts you off starting in the first place. Hence, a quilt that was supposed to be a birthday present in May 2013 was finally completed in January 2014.
Once I'd started it, it actually went quite quickly. I devoted most of a weekend to it and squirrelled away in the sewing room, listening to Lord Peter Wimsey on the BBC Iplayer and emerging only for occasional sustaining snacks and cups of tea. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out and I just hope that my grandson is too!
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