Block of the Week

My poor little block of the week is DONE!  This started way back in 2014, as a weekly block from a local quilt shop. If you finished your block and took it in, the next week was free. If not, it was $5.  It was a lot of fun, and the shop did a TON of work - they actually let everyone pick their own border fabric, and worked out the colours for the blocks from that - so almost every one was different. Like I said, a ton of work.

I managed to keep up and get all the blocks done, then the alternate blocks were finished fairly quickly, and that's where the wheels came off. I had let the owner talk me out of buying enough of my border print to use the edge pattern for the border - it was one-sided, so would have needed over 8 meters of fabric for borders.

I searched 5 times over the next 5 years, looking for more of that print - Robert Kaufmann Effervescence. I found every colourway except mine (and no, I don't want to know that you have 4 yards sitting around your sewing room, thank you very much).  I could not let it go, and changing the border fabric never crossed my mind. Eventually, I gave up my search, made a 2-part border for the other 2 sides, and called it "good enough".

And then I thought I'd custom quit this baby. Lots of opportunity in those little blocks to do some nice work - so it sat. And stared at me every time I went into my closet. And sat some more.

This year, I joined a 100 day UFO challenge, and when asked about our oldest UFO, this baby came out, with her story.  What I didn't mention above is the falling out with the quilt shop that happened about a year later, and when I wrote the story of this quilt for that UFO group, my resentment was clear, apparently.  Everyone said, just let it go.  Release the quilt, and release the old feelings with it.

So I decided to do just that. No more custom quilting plan. Out it came from the closet, I found a nice design that fit the blocks and played about with my automation software to make it look like each block was quilted with this design individually, when in fact it was a pantograph.

Not perfect, and if you look closely you can tell, but I love the overall look, and most importantly, IT IS DONE!