I do NOT heart this

I'm working my way to the finish of the Heart You QAYG top. The ten rows have been measured and the average length calculated (with butted seam allowances, they tend to grow).

The 18 joining strips have been cut and are ready to sew on.

 

As I was carrying all the rows back to the sewing studio, I passed a bathroom scale and decided to weigh the lot. Was it really as heavy as I feared?

It was (I, however, have lost 10 pounds somewhere along the way!) The wad of rows weighed nearly 6 pounds! How could I give something this heavy to a child, for which this would probably represent nearly 10% of the kid's weight?

With disappointment in my heart, I let the wad of rows sit on the ironing board for several days while I worked through my feelings about this. For some reason, triangles hit the spot every time when I need a distraction or a time-out.

I pulled all the HTSs I've been making from itty-bitty scraps (but still large enough to make a 1.25" square), as well as all the 1.5" HTSs I've been collecting, and grouped everything into pinwheel quartets. Then I tossed the groups in with the triangles I'd already matched up to make HTSs. Lots of leaders-enders in this pile.

 

Some of the resulting pinwheels will be large enough to add to the 2.5" bin of squares, bricks, and strips, but most will be trimmed down to 2" and put in the center of 9 patches.

Yesterday after the Dreadfuls I went through my "big" triangle box (the box and the stash itself? Not that big), measuring the littlest ones to make sure they were 3.5" or more along the hypotenuse (only 2 were too small for the box and were relegated to the itty-bitty tin), and sorting by light/dark[ish].

Finally this morning I was over myself. Since I really wanted to sew up all those potential pinwheels, I told myself I could only sew those triangles/HTSs as leader-enders to that QAYG behemoth, which I'd decided could live in the back of my car as an emergency blanket, but really needed to be dealt with and finished.

But while I was pinning joining strips to the first row . . .

. . . I wondered to myself: "Self? How heavy was the last behemoth you made, the one you feared might crush anyone sleeping under it?"

So I leapt up, pulled it out of the closet and weighed it. It weighs 2 pounds more than this one (as it did when I wrote all the deets in my blog about it--I could've checked here first!), and I recalled being perfectly comfortable sleeping under it. Granted, that one is full/double-sized, but it gave me hope that perhaps this pink and red mass isn't as hopeless as I'd feared. Too heavy for a child, but perhaps I'll add it to the pile for the adults in Community First! Village.

Now I'm heading back to the studio with a lighter heart and a lesson learned: sheeting is the heaviest "batting" I'll ever want to use for any future QAYG/reversible quilts.