still stinky pinky

are you "tired of pink?" if so, you'll want to skip this post! "pinky stinky edna" got a lot of work done on her this week. getting the pieces up on the design wall last week was quite useful and made assembly easy, at least until i made my slew of mistakes, but it made knowing where to put everything easy and was so helpful.

with the top row complete, i started working on the horizontal sashing pieces next. they needed the side star points added first. i got reacquainted with how to get the directional prints on the way i wanted them to be oriented, then added the 16-patch blocks.

i'm still making bonus mini hsts out of the little corner cut-offs. i'm still unsure what i'm doing with them, but i'm not wasting them! if i don't add them to the back of the quilt somewhere, i'll either make a feature patch out of them for a hazel-style improv quilt or make a small bean bag for the grans to play with. either way, i'm making them and putting them aside as i go.

i had an early walk with my seester, katee, who lives in the neighborhood, so the house was really quiet when i got home. i didn't want to do anything noisy (dishes) and didn't feel like starting house design work just yet, so i decided to put a few pieces together. once i had these two done, i decided to work on the rest of the row.

i'm having a little trouble with the V at the intersection of the star points, and i don't know why. this one turned out pretty well, but it's also puffy. i just don't know what i'm doing wrong, but i'm keeping at it and not worrying about little things like this too much.

there were some other problems with lining up of seams when i added the vertical sashings to the 16-patches that i did unpick and re-do. those were too glaringly off and did not align with my intergrity-but-not-perfectionist mentality, so i fixed them. 

 by the time the rest of the household was up and moving, i had the sashings complete and the first two rows of 16-patches attached together. it felt really good! the only "stinky" i had in that whole process was one set of misaligned seams i redid and my thread was being tricky. but overall, it was smooth sailing. 

after breakfast and a few other chores, i decided it was going to be a quilting day after all. i went back to the sewing room to proceed with the next set of sashings and row. that's when i realized i didn't put the star points on the bottoms of the vertical sashing pieces. oh, shoot. that definitely needed to be done. 

so i unpicked the rows a few inched past where the points needed to be added and got to work making star points on all the corners. it was more difficult wrangling the whole row around for each of those small seams than it was doing each block individually, but i managed.

i was quite relieved to have that done! i soothed myself with a mini strawberry ice cream cone from trader joe's. that was nice pick-me-up before i moved on the the next set of hotizontal sashings. 

i haven' t looked at the pattern in months. at this point, i just know how everything is supposed to go together and am making my way through it based on my guesses and experience. there might be a much more efficient way outlined in the pattern, but i haven't taken the time to look it up.

things just got stinkier from there: i put the wrong star points on a sashing set, i nicked the center of a star with my snips when cutting a stray thread, i had one sashing set cut too long and didn't realize it until after i put the points on, which then had to be redone also, and i had another block not line up with the 16-patches with had to be unpicked and corrected. 

i took deep breaths, kept calm and carried on: never give up, never surrender, keep making that quilt.

on sunday, i was on the phone with d3, who is out of state at university currently, for 3.5 hours, and part of that time i worked on "pinky stinky" to keep my hands busy while we chatted. i got row three assembled and row four's star points added to the pieces and some of it attached, but i'm waiting for d5 to finish the 16 patches before i can progress any further. she wants me to take her shopping, but i think she's going to have to do a few blocks for me first.

(the photo looks confusing because row three is layered over row two so i could fit more on the board, and that's hard to see in the photo.)