Making Progress

As far as my quilt goes, I'm liking it more and more. I decided on Kona white for the sashing and borders, but still haven't decided on the backing. I've been kinda busy so I haven't had a lot of time to spend on it. Hopefully this weekend will be calm and I can get alot done with it. I've already decided that my next project will be a baby quilt for my Goddaughter, Addisyn. She's precious :-)


got the sashing done


"Summer Splash"


My Goddaughter, Addisyn.



Also, I've finished another graduate class...thank God. This was the worst class I've ever taken and the professor was terrible. I could not wait for it to be over. The class was Human Resources Management, in which I know absolutely nothing about. The class met 3 days for 3 hours. Of those 9 hours, our professor "taught" for about 30 minutes. We spent 2.5 HOURS the first day on introductions. Seriously? Do I really need to know THAT much about these other people? I'm thinking no. And THEN, she had us post our resumes online and required that we review and comment on every single one. So I spent practically 4 days reviewing my classmates' resumes and making comments and suggestions on each one. "Won't it be nice to have 40 suggestions on how to improve your resume?" NO. Because my resume effing rocks. Thankyouverymuch. The bulk of the class work consisted of us reading the entire textbook and working online exercises to check our understanding. But she didn't grade the assignments; she didn't even give feedback. So I have no idea if I'm understanding the material correctly. To top it off, we had a group paper and presentation. We didn't get to pick our groups, so naturally I'm in a group with the one guy noone wants to be in a group with. You know that guy: MD, MBA, knows everything, owns his own business, talks over the professor, takes over the paper and presentation....OH, and English is his second language (if you can call what comes from his mouth "language").

So now I've read and commented on 40 resumes, read 600 pages of textbook gibberish, attempted 8 multiple-part fairly difficult analysis examples (with no feedback), used my "knowledge" of human resources to write a few paragraphs of a 10 page analysis paper over "that guy's" company, and spent 3 hours editing said paper for spelling and grammar. After all of that, I've gained about a 1% improvement in my understanding of HR management.

But at least I know the life and work history of all 40 of my classmates.

It's a start....

After months of procrastination and indecision, I have FINALLY begun my first quilt!!!! I am really excited about it! There is so much inspiration out there for modern quilting and I become obsessed with these fabulous quilts that are being made. I really really want to make some fabulous quilts of my own, but I'm so scared of messing up or not having it turn out perfect, that I've had "stage fright" for a while now. But I came to the conclusion that A quilt (perfect or not) is better than NO quilt! Right?!?! So I've decided to keep this first one very simple. It's going to be a "stacked coin" baby (or lap) quilt and instead of using my best fabric, I'm using fabric from a charm pack I bought a long time ago at a quilting store with my mom. I'm not familiar with the designer, but the fabric is decent enough and is in bright, summery colors. (Califon by Mark Lipinski). My main concern is to not completely destroy it. So far, so good. I've cut the square charms into rectangles and sewed 4 rows of 15 blocks so far. Now all thats left is the (really) hard part of figuring what sashing and borders and (God help me) binding to use, and then sewing all that together. The binding is what scares me the most....I've read books and tutoriasl about it, and had my mom explain it to me over the phone, but when I actually tried to do it on a pillow, it was a disaster and I ended up not using binding at all. So. I'm really just trying to focus on getting through the process of it all and not worrying about how good everything turns out; I just need the learning experience. It is SO HARD for me though! I've never considered myself a perfectionist.........okay well maybe I have. It's just so frustrating when you're learning a craft like this and you KNOW perfection is not expected the first few go 'rounds........ohhhh but I want it so bad!!!! Patience is NOT one of my virtues. :-( But anywho, without further adeu, here is the beginning of my first quilt!!! I plan to call it "summer splash". I think its fitting enough. Any ideas or thoughts about colors for sashing, border, etc are appreciated!!


These are the fabrics I'm using. They were 5'' squares that I just cut in half. I wanted to do a rainbow sort of thing with having all the same coordinating colors grouped together, but the fabric didn't allow for that, so I ended up decided to have one strip be a rainbow progression and the rest of the strips be random, sort of like creating order from chaos.....so philiosphical, I know :-p



Here's my calming, rainbow strip.




And now here's all the stips sewed together. I decided for the sake of randomness and moderness to put the rainbow strip in the middle....but I dont know if it would look better on one of the ends.....still trying to decide. Miss indecsion here. Anyone have an opinion? :-p

Can't wait to see how it turns out!!