Saturday, August 4, 2007

The joy of "un-sewing"


I realize these look like perfectly normal paper pieced blocks. They, however, have comprised much of my past few days. My LQG has an arrangement where in order to use our meeting space for free, we will make a quilt to be raffled off at the annual fund-raising event. A Judy Niemeyer pattern was chosen (before I joined this group) and so it was decided to make a sunflower type of pattern and we began with this outer radiating sections. I had seen the cover of the pattern, but (silly me) didn't think to ask for a copy. And so about a week after receiving the pieces to make these up, I sat down to do so. Clearly I remembered that the outer sections (purples) were going to be scrappy so somehow assumed that the golds/yellows/peaches would be scrappy too. WRONG! Having dutifully shortened my stitches for paper piecing and even trimmed up the blocks I took them to our meeting on Thursday night. Well no, I had not got this right and they had to be re-done. However, we are short of the golds/yellows/peaches and needed to save as much of the old ones as I possibly could. So with my best pair of glasses and some really good light, I began to un-sew. Needless to say the paper pattern was trashed but managed to get all the pieces undone. So I gathered all the matching colors for the seven points and tried to re-sew them. However, with the trimming, several of the pieces were unusable (I learned after trying to sew them again - and unsewing them again). But never say die - Friday I spent most of the entire afternoon sewing, ever so carefully and managed to find a little more of the peach fabric and completed these two silly blocks. The centers are all done, so mostly we now have to assemble the top.

I really don't think I will be buying any tickets for this little treasure. It's not really my style anyway. And maybe next year we could be thinking about something with squares or diamonds or some such. No more paper pieced sunflowers.

2 comments:

Susan said...

They are beautiful, no doubt about it. I would probably have tried to buy more fabric, or sell my first-born to bribe someone else to do the blocks for me. =)

Unknown said...

Yes they are beautiful blocks, but knowing my short fuse I would probably have thrown them in the corner and said to heck with it... 10 points to you for hanging in there and keeping your cool.