Mind Games

When we were growing up, my mother would send me in to help my youngest sister clean her messy room because, as she explained it to me, I could always make a game out of it.

She was right, of course, and it's something I continue to this day--making a game of Tedious Tasks.

The latest "TT" has been a result of my decision to quilt each wonky star by itself--all 80 of them. I made up the game of "4 Esses" to get through them without losing interest or momentum, and to keep myself active as well.

For every Star I quilted, I'd get up and move to the cutting table where . . .

Burying the beginning threads before stitching over them.

. . . a Scrap was dealt with in its entirety, . . .

Confirming my suspicion that I cut down my chorus face mask as soon as Austin Harmony dissolved.

. . . a Square was trimmed to 3.5", . . .

160 of these boogers to deal with!

. . . and a Sip was taken of my coffee.

Don't judge. It's a perpetual cup of coffee.

After several mornings of this, all the Stars are quilted (and yet I still haven't used up that cone of King Tut "Gemstones"!) . . .

The Sunset thread was used in the five red stars.

. . . and the other piles are diminishing at a rapid pace. In fact, the less daunt that remained, the more I wanted to break out of the one-for-one restraints. So, toward the end of the stars, I was trimming two to four squares or scraps for every star quilted, and the results are so satisfying!

/\  Untrimmed                                                 Trimmed  /\

All scraps finally contained in their assigned tin.

As silly as it might seem to have a favorite star, I have favorite star. It used a 2.5"x4.5" brick that was awkward and didn't seem to "go" with anything, until this project.

There are only three triangles sewn onto the yellow section. The upper left red/blue/green triangle was part of the original print of the fabric. It makes me happy that this awkward piece has a forever home.

Today I started quilting the neutral sections--more on that in a future post--and ran into an issue that I'd been hoping wouldn't happen. (But did I do anything to make sure it didn't? No!)

Something felt weird as I approached the end of one column, and when I finished and flipped the quilt over--sure enough: I'd managed to catch a big hunk of excess backing into the quilting.

There was roughly six inches of quilting catching that fabric, and rather than cut into the fabric and try to pull it and all its threads out of the stitching, I opted for unquilting this section. Once that was done, I pinned up this excess fabric so it couldn't get folded to the back again. Such a dumb thing to let happen!