still edna-ing

my edna strips and star pieces are all cut, after no small amount of trial. the number of mistakes i have made in the process of making this quilt is incredible. it hardly seems possible. but i've taken it all in stride, just kept calm and pressed on. after a certain number of errors, it began to get funny whenever a new one occurred and i could laugh it off. 

i had a fat quarter of that large pink circle fabric, a tilda dot basic, and somehow i ended up with not quite enough fabric to cut all 5 sets of large and small squares i needed for the stars i'm making with it. i was a mere two small squares short. i don't know if i turned the fq the wrong way or what, but i came up short.

what to do, what to do?

at first i decided to just replace it with one more star from another of the four star fabrics. i was cutting the purply berry fabric (pod vine from michael miller) next and made an extra set from that.

then i came across this cute strawberry fabric hiding in my stash and thought that would be a good replacement, so i started to cut that up.

but after consideration, i changed my mind. again. (these are the kinds of problems i cause myself.) i remembered there was a spare large square of the tilda dot and chided myself for not thinking to cut that up for my two squares. but on consideration, i realized i could only get one small square with the needed dimensions out of it, of course, because it was 1/2" too small to get two side-by-side. 

sometimes my brain is sloooow to catch on. this day it was sloooow a whole lot. it was like that old dial-up lagging sound you'd hear while the computer was trying to connect through the modem. eventually, the old brain caught up/connected. but it took a minute. every time.

i really wanted to figure out a way to eek out two star points from the fabric i had (why this was important to me, i can no longer say. either of my first options would have been just fine). fully half the square was going to be trimmed off for the star point anyway. so i pieced two squares together from the leftover bits of fabric.

then i decided that didn't look good enough and went to etsy to order more of the fabric. actually, i think what happened is i noticed the tilda dot while i was looking for a different fabric later in the day and just decided to do it right and get more of the tilda dot, which i would use again elsewhere. goodness, i was silly. i think i'd spent so much time already fixing mistakes and was feeling patient with the whole process so i felt like getting it exactly as i had planned no matter what i had to do to achieve this. that was a little overkill.

once the stars were cut, i moved on to the other strip sets. after making the first two sets of strips with the star blocks, i decided to change the length of the strips to accommodate the 16 patch blocks. i knew what the new length was, but when i cut the next set i made half of them 1/2" too short. ugh. 

do over. file the scraps. move forward.

this pink blender fabric is a different colorway of my favorite neutral blender, which i've used a lot and still have more of. (see it on the back of "collins".) it's by corey yoder for moda. the pink looks a lot different from the white with black sunburst spot thingies. i didn't recognize it as the same fabric at first. it's a good blender print. i'd take it in several colors. i think i might also have it in yellow.

i put together the third set of strips and began attaching the star points to the ends of the strips. while trimming off the hst ends, i accidentally cut one of the other strips that was hiding under the end of the one i was cutting. ouch. sloppy.

the good news on this one is that the nicked end will be trimmed for a star point later and there's enough left of it to do the point correctly. i won't get the little bonus hst from that point, but that's okay. it could have been a bigger loss, for sure.

at this point d5 came into the sewing room and asked if she could help me sew. i put her to work on pairing the strips for me and we began to fly through the job. i wasn't done with making mistakes, but it did get better.

 i don't remember why i took a photo of these mice strips. i don't think anything went wrong with them. just a cute process photo, i suppose. i have been second-guessing this choice because of the strong secondary colors in the mice clothing. but i think it's going to be fine. they're too cute to not include.

the pink rose print (heather ross far, far away 2 collection for windham) is another loud-ish piece that doesn't actually fit perfectly in the color scheme. but i think it's good to have one or two colors that are a tad off to give depth and balance to a scrappy quilt like this. it's not completely clashy, so it adds that little note that an ugly fabric or two can contribute which a lot of quilters like to incorporate. but without using ugly fabric because this one is really cute. 

that's all the strips and stars pieces cut now. we've assembled all the strip pairs and i've added the star center block and top points to four of the strip sets. they're all gathered together in that opening photo at the top of the post. (i put that one first because it's the only daylight photo i took and looks the nicest.)

once we get the 16 patch blocks assembled we can begin putting the top together! 

i'm not stopping til we get there, no matter what other mistakes i manage to make along the way.

never give up, never surrender.

make the quilt.