moving on

golly, friends, if i ever needed an ego stroke, i'd just come here and share some quilting woes. you ladies have responded quite beyond expectation to my fmq disaster. that is certainly not why i shared my troubles, but it was a rather unexpected and pleasant result.

i have come to terms with the quilt catastrophe, deciding to donate it when it's completed and make a replacement. as you can see above, after the fmq-induced meltdown and past unsavory experience with spray basting, we are moving forward on the quilt and my 5 yr old, d4, has her quilting job back. both of us are happy.

(by the way, don't all of you allow trikes in the house? especially pink ones? i'd never considered it before this house, but it's an advantage of tile floors and large central hallways. especially in the summer heat.)

after reading all the comments, there were a few things i thought i should make clear about my fmq woes:

1. i did not like the way the dense quilting was changing the look of the quilt even before it got ugly. the replacement will be straightlined to maintain the look i wanted.
2. i was happy with the wishbone quilting in the white strips and most of the other quilting in the patterned strips was acceptable, albeit not very good.
3. the only part i was considering unpicking was the wandering wave/horrid diamonds in the pink strip. by no means was i going to unpick the whole quilt or even half of it.
4. another reason i was distressed was that in addition to the lovely lottie da fabrics, i had used a few scraps of out-of-print fabrics that had sentimental value and connection to the recipient. also, you may have noticed i used some of my all-time favorite fabric (meadowdot in robin's egg/mint) in the quilt. i was sick over the waste of such precious prints. fortunately, i think i have enough scraps remaining to work into the replacement quilt.

alright, that's all i'm going to say about this until it's complete or i get the replacement done.

this is what i'm up to now:

yes, another newfo! i just got an invitation to a cousin-in-law's baby shower this weekend, so suddenly i need another baby quilt in a week. there is no fear of fmq disasters this time around. it will definitely be straightlined. goodness, my family needs to slow down on babies! i'm already behind by about 4 quilts just from the last 4 months and i can't get anything else done with all the baby quilts i keep "needing". there was another cousin that just had a baby last week but somehow i didn't get the shower invite, which was sad. but i was relieved to know i'd also missed the stress of trying to complete another pronto quilt.

this quilt is another simple strips quilt that started with my leftover jelly roll strips from riley blake's superstar that i used in s2's quilt, "bandwidth". it was feeling very flat on it's own, so i added three bits from my stash. this perked things up, but when all stash options, which are decidedly feminine and floral, ran out, it still needed something. hence a quick browse at some on sale fabrics while at jo ann for something entirely different. (this is completely legal under the terms of my personal clauses in my fabric fast, but it still feels disappointing that i made a purchase - even if it was only a few quarter yards.)

while i was quilting this afternoon, some other fun stuff was going on around the house:

 sister hair brushing time. that long strawberry blonde hair is irresistible to brush! (and, yes, the nice room is still wip central.)

the toddler played her new favorite game "cold feet" with me, covering mama's feet with some paper napkins to warm them up. lately, she gets out my scrap basket and says, "feet cold, feet coooold!" then proceeds to wrap her feet in scraps. today she decided mama's feet needed help.

as the late afternoon sunlight moved across the dining sewing room, it highlighted my iron and lit up the yellow walls in the loveliest way. i tried catching the effect, to no avail.

 the extremes in exposure left me with either a well-exposed iron and dark room . . .

or well-exposed room and washed out iron. oh, well. i have the warm fuzzy image in my mind if not in pixels. at least these will remind me of the experience.