For the Love of Fabric

I think that love of beautiful fabric runs in my blood.  I also got a good dose of encouragement from Grammy.  Christmas break has been a long stretch of much needed sewing time!  I have gotten so much done!

I posted a couple of days ago my finished Dove in the Window quilt top.  When Momma and I went on our road trip last summer, Cindy and Abbey took me to amazing fabric stores.  I brought along this pattern and a color scheme with plans to buy fabric along the way.  Cindy took us to this beautiful store front with an incredible clearance section where I bought some fabric not intended for the Dove in the Window.  I just wanted to have it and couldn't pass up the great deal!  Fast forward to the huge store Abbey took me to that draws people from across state lines.  Rows upon rows of beautiful bolts.  Momma and Abbey helped me pick out two colors for my doves that ended up working with a piece that I bought with Cindy in Ohio.  And again, there were prints there that I couldn't pass up!  I was so excited when I told Dustin that he told me I could always buy that much!  I told him not to tempt me because I could always go back.

And there I was one weekend about 7 months pregnant with August doing the math, learning how to cut parallelograms, and cutting out a couple thousand of them for the quilt.  I didn't think, even with all those pieces, that the quilt would be all that hard to put together.

Just a hint of how many pieces went into the blocks.  Bonnie giving some love to the blocks.

Boy, was I wrong!  I had never cut parallelograms before, let alone tried to sew them together.  When put together the doves would make up an 8 pointed star.  I had never done one of those either.  Y-seams, why not add in that unexplored realm of sewing too!  I literally cried and ripped multiple times trying to get that first star together.  Dustin tried to help.  I finally figured it out after watching some Youtube videos.  I then had to watch some more when it came to the Y-seams.  I only had a few done by the time August came and then the project got put on hold for a while.  And then i kind of started to do it again, and then I'd stop, and start again.  Finally this fall, I buckled down and had a goal set of finishing the blocks before Christmas.  I didn't care about the whole thing, I just wanted the blocks done and my ironing board back.  Christmas Eve and I finally finished them.  And then I was excited to get the thing put together.  This is such an imperfect quilt that will be hidden away for a while and never set before a judge, or my Grammy, but I am none the less very happy with how beautiful it looks.  The colors are beautiful and I love the pattern itself.  I will not be doing any parallelograms, 8 pointed stars, or Y-seams for a while though!