juggling

having more than one project going at a time can be fun, but it also means some projects take a backseat, getting pushed further and further behind. i have at least 3 prominent projects i'd like to complete immediately. finally, i've got a brainstorm of how to embellish "at last" and i'm still in the middle of "out on a limb." also, now that i know a bit more about sewing and quilting, i realize some mistakes i made when i started up "star cookie." that's lead to some decision making regarding unpicking stitches and possibly even more fixes than that. i'm torn between just moving ahead and redoing a major portion of what i've already done. one of the curses of a little knowledge, i suppose. when i didn't know any better, i was blissfully stitching away. can't do that now. i'm feeling a bit pressured to be done with these quilts not just because of the excited babies who keep saying, "is my blanket done?!" every time i touch them, but because i'm taking a quilt class next month and that will mean another project in the mix.

"star cookie" has been pinned together since october, which is a big no,no. i live in one of the driest places on earth, so i didn't worry too much about rust in the beginning. but now that i sew in the bawthroom, i need to get those pins out. so today while the 4 yr old had her bath and the 3 yr old played with some of my recent project scraps, i worked on unpicking a few of the handquilted seams i completed last october. (see how long it's taking me to decide and finish up this project?!) my problems lie in that i didn't square off the quilt sandwich before i began stitching and my straight piecing seams are not very straight, hence some discrepancies between the quilting lines and the fabric seams.  i think i'm going to compromise at unpicking the last few seams and leaving the rest. i really need to undo those because i ignorantly just followed the stripes on the fabric not knowing they weren't necessarily straight and definitely not in line with the previous stitching i'd done.

one good side effect: i know the marking pencil i've been using really will disappear because i can no longer see the guide marks i made last time i worked on this quilt.