Overnight Success

Well, I had to title this "Overnight Success" because I literally stayed up overnight - until 5 am as a matter of fact - the night before Christmas in order to get this quilt done. This was a gift for my oldest son, who had recently returned home after being gone for Air Force boot camp and tech school in San Antonio, TX.

I had started the quilt a month earlier, ignorantly assuming I could whip it out in a weekend - ha! It was supposed to be all done in the fabrics used as the border. I had taken my pattern into a fabric store, and asked them to calculate how much fabric I would need to change this from a 9-block wall hanging into a twin sized quilt. This is one of those patterns where you make the individual circles, then sew the circles together. It is a quilt-as-you-go kind of thing, which I (again ignorantly) assumed would be easier to wrangle on my machine. I'm pretty good at making quilt tops, but horrible at actually turning them into quilts because the quilting part is so intimidating to me. I should really take a class on that, but that will have to wait for now.

Anyway, problem number one was that the quilt shop figured the yardage wrong. They forgot to account for the fact that the size of the circles is NOT the size of the block - you have to fold the circles over and sew them together, making them squares in essence. So, after working diligently with all my stripes and dots, and feeling like I was cruising through my quilt, I started putting my circles together. It was only then that I realized to my horror that I was only going to have enough blocks for a crib quilt!!!! I was so disappointed that I nearly gave up the whole project. I knew I couldn't get more of the same fabric, and even if I did, I wouldn't have time to cut and piece all those 9-patch blocks I was using for the centers. When I did the math I realized I didn’t quite have HALF as many as I needed. So, I was ready to give up. I went to bed very disappointed, and in the morning, woke up realizing I could do something with solids instead, and long story short, the results are in the photos.

Of course I had other problems ... it was HEAVY. There's no good way to put together one of these quilts in a large size. My 17 year old daughter thankfully held my hand all night and encouraged me to finish the quilt. She did a lot of pinning, thread clipping and most importantly, held the quilt up while I struggled with it in the last stages of trying to get everything sewn down. The difficulty is in the fact that once the strips are sewn together, you have to top stitch down the flaps. I did this as I went, and worked in small groups which I then sewed together, but the two long side borders were added last, and then had to be sewn down, which was really hard. I will definitely NOT be doing this pattern again. It took WAY too much fabric (because of all the doubling over). I do like it though, and it is my first entirely finished quilt. I've shared some of my other quilt tops with you, and the one wall hanging that is complete, but this is the first time I've completely finished a full sized quilt. YAY for me! :)

Oh, and one thing I have to say is the unexpected blessing of seeing crosses in the border. This was totally unintentional, but I love it. God is Good! Originally the whole quilt was going to be made out of these fabrics, but I’m actually glad it didn’t work out. I think it would have been way too busy. I like the solids on the body of the quilt.