How in the heck?

Even though I completed amassing i6 a couple of days ago, somehow this morning, I had second thoughts about a tiny handful of choices.

Yup.

Oops.

Currently on the hunt for two replacement pieces. Dagnabbit!  I'll let you know how I fared in a few hours.

How the day ends

Back and forth and back and forth.  A little bit here and a little bit there, but mostly I worked in one place - over there.
LOL



i6 is not complete, but it is about as close as can be, and once I get the mess on the table out of my own way I should have no trouble finding those last few inches.  i7 is one-quarter in place, too, so the day wasn't a total loss.  Not really.

Nope

I did not manage to complete laying out i6, but I did begin i7.

I KNOW - what the heck is up with me, right?

There are just under a dozen missing bits to i6, which I totally intend to nail down today... throughout the day. . . eventually.  Please, God, let it be so.  But there is a top I would like to allow myself to complete for work, and housework to get to that has also been skillfully ignored for a while, so in all honesty I do have a list of needful things to get to that should supersede i6.

LOL - who do I think I'm kidding?  See you in a while with a photo and a wickedly pleased grin.

Moving in the right direction

Wandered into my quiltmaking hole about 10AM intending to make a positive dent in i6.

And I did!  Down from 20 to 16, and made a few substitutions along the way.

Today will be a good day

Over the last week I worked (so, no time with my dear Dutchman).  I also ferried 'people' back and forth to school and tutoring and appointments - and I had an appointment or two myself.

Then there was the lost time spent searching for my keys. Holy crap, what a pain and time drain.

But, I have found my keys - quite by accident - and things are nearly back to normal, so... YEA!

In truth, I actually tried to sneak a bit of time in here and there working on my 'color dance', but didn't get very much accomplished.  In fact, I began the week with only seventeen missing inches, and was determined to make a dent the moment I could return to it.  And did I?  Did I make a dent?

Yes, I dented it, but I dented it in the wrong direction.  Somehow I find myself with twenty missing inches to fill in this morning.  I blame karma and pangs of guilt for the turnaround in progress.  So let's see if I can reverse the tide and finish i6 today, shall we?

What are you working on?

Thirty to go

Having a tough time finding the rest of i6, so I suppose there's a mighty amount of picking up and sorting to do before I can/should proceed.  Also happily using the last of the true yellows.

Did I forget to mention . . . ?

Finished i5 a few days back, but haven't had any time to update here.  And, yes, i6 is well underway.

Feeling "cheeky."

THREE!

Three missing inches - that's all.  Three, and then I can stitch i5 together. . . but it's not going to happen today.  I have something equally as important (and potentially exciting) to get done.  So this is me walking away from my Dutchman for the day.

Fifteen to go

That deserves a big woohoo!

BUT, it's still too dark to do a proper job, so the rest is on hiatus.

70+

Seventy plus inches found.  i5 is coming together. :v)

A promise is a promise

Here are i3 and i4 side-by-side. . .

. . .and here's a shot of the corrections that had to be made. Yes, there was a lot of seam ripping that had to be done.

Holy crap, I wish I could figure out how I managed to make such a series of flip-flop errors.  Well, after two hours of ripping and re-sewing, everything was A-OK again.

Did I forget to mention. . .

I may have forgotten to say that i5 is about one-third in place.

There are many other things to work on around the ol' hacienda, but I do hope to throw a few hours towards i5 throughout the day.  There will be a photo of some sort posted later today, so stay tuned.  Or... visit again tomorrow.

Have a great day.

When thinking can be a bad thing

There's all sorts of thinking that can be done; simple thoughts to highly complex contemplating.  Thinking that leads to conclusions (which could possibly affect countless others) or those dozens of aimless daydreams we have every day.  I won't drone on because I think you catch my drift.

Well, I've been ruminating - the serious sort of thought conjuring, too, not that simpleton stuff.  Nope, I've been having some Olympic-sized cranium sessions, wondering about my future, postulating about my current circumstances, and hair-splitting things I have already done - which, let's face it, never does anyone any good.

At any rate, my inner dialogues about this current long-term quilt thing have led me to wonder if I've made more work for myself by creating a very large material cache to choose from.  When I began constructing the 100-piece blocks my aim was to use what I had on my shelves.  Surely this would be enough (because I have a stupidly large, and very diverse stash).  And seeing the color selection as finite, I made do when choosing each inch; I was happy to have something "close enough." There was no laboring over every color pixel, the blocks came together quickly, and I factored the quilt top would be finished in one and one-half years.

Well, that was back in April of 2013.  Since then, every time I have realized I could add more greys to my background selection, or have expanded my choices of yellows and flesh tones, I have also managed to grow the time expended on building out each block.  The more precise I have tried to get to matching the actual, the more time it takes to complete one block.  What once was 4-5 hours of finding and 2.5 hours of sewing is now days in the making.

TOO MUCH THINKING!
Too many choices.
Way too much perfection.

I may need to re-evaluate what I am allowing myself as a palette.  Perhaps simplifying would be a good course of action if I ever want to see the completion of this monster.  Or... maybe I am afraid of finishing this.

As you can see, I have given this a lot of thought. Maybe it's time to stop thinking and just go for it.

Post script to i4

I had a chance to work on i4 last Saturday (after returning from a commercial shoot), and found some time to make a dent on it today.  Finally!

It's up to just over sixty found inches, and that feels good.  Not great, but it's better progress than the usual.