Finishing Is A Good Thing

While I was at St. Christopher last week, I worked on two projects. The first one is a charity quilt for our guild, the Cobblestone Quilt Guild. I found a lot of squares that I've had around for quite a while and cut up some of them into triangles and used the lighter ones as squares to set them off and--voila--a charity quilt was born. I actually had the top finished and pinned together before I went to St. Christopher and quilted it while I was there. I then sewed on the binding and there was a finished project. I really enjoy sewing these charity quilts because I think it is important to step out of our own little world from time to time and recognize that there are so many others that have it so much worse than we do. And if this little quilt can bring some comfort into a hurting situation, then I am so very grateful.
The second project I worked on while I was there was a little more complex. I saw it in Fons and Porter's Love of Quilting July 2007 and the article was called "Red Sky at Night." I really liked this pattern and cut out all of the pieces before I left for the retreat. And I might as well confess what I did. Do you see all of those red pieces? There are 144 of them. They're dramatic, aren't they? Well, the first time I cut them, I cut them wrong! I could have cut them down and used them anyway but, alas, they were already smaller than the size called for. It's one thing to misread a size (such as 3/8" instead of 5/8") but it's an entirely different matter to ADD an additional cutting step--which is what I did. I cut the correctly sized triangles in half again. What was I thinking???? Don't answer. . . So anyway, I started over, cut the pieces the correct size and now have a large set of triangles that will somehow be part another quilt. I will have to say that my red stash has been greatly diminished in this process.
So, keeping on, I did sew all of the blocks at the retreat and then laid the quilt out on the floor after I returned home and sewed it together row by row. I really like it and I think it was worth the journey to get to the finish line.