Slow Progress

Have you ever had a quilt that you just can’t make any headway on? I’ve stopped and started on this Irish inspired quilt for over a year and have yet to make a single block. Well, correctly at least. I’ve made lots of screw up blocks. I got the idea for the pattern from an old quilting book I found at a library book sale. It’s called A Year in Patchwork and has a quilt to make for each month, loosely based on the “theme” of each month. 

I love celebrating the changing seasons, so it’s a fun book to browse through. I loved the idea of the March pattern and bought a stack of beautiful green fabric.

The quilt uses a mix of dark and light fabric to create a cross like design in the quilt. Some of the fabrics are shot with metallics which give the composed blocks movement and texture.This was also the first time I had used batiks. I love working with them now. The colors are so rich and saturated and I love the extra weight or heft that the batik printing processes lends to the fabric.

My batiks

My metallic fabrics

 So, with my beautiful fabrics, a seasonal inspiration for the blocks, and a thought to hand quilt the finished piece with a Celtic design, I jumped right into construction. However, the directions are wrong and the center block is about 2 inches to small to correctly fit the pieced border around each block. No big deal if I had made a test block. However, that would have been way to clever of me. When did I realize the mistake? After I had already cut about, ohhhh, 400 triangles or so. Brillant.

My pile of already cut triangles. Too late to fix it now!

So, after a quick consult with my favorite quilt shop owner, I enlarged the center block to 8.5 inches and started over again. At this point, I had already made about 4 different blocks because I originally thought the problem with the sizing was my lame attempts at mitering the corners of each block. So, with a few new fabrics in the mix and my resized block, I’m ready to try it again. Wish me luck!

Progress at last!