Waiting for Downton

(An hour until Season 4 begins, though I'm not sure I'm going to hang in with it after the way Season 3 ended..such a betrayal....but with Juan Pablo, the Bachelor being my alternate choice, it's going to require some consideration).

We never did chat about Resolutions. I actually hate New Years Resolutions. I mean, who ever really keeps them? Some spur of the moment decision to not eat potato chips, or to roll out of bed every morning at 5 a.m. to do an hour's worth of Prancercise...

Who are we kidding? And then after that 3rd glass of wine, or 2nd ice cream sandwich, we're feeling like failures and wallowing in self-pity for how we can't keep a simple Resolution meant to better ourselves. The best way to avoid that is to not participate in the Resolution propaganda.

So this year I'm thinking more in terms of setting some 'loose guidelines' for myself. And one of those was to make an effort to spend some time (a little or a lot, doesn't matter) each day doing something I enjoy, something that makes me feel good, something I can express myself through and learn from by doing. (Obviously, that isn't updating the blog on a daily basis ). 

Seriously, I've spent every day working on something creative in the studio. You saw the first effort, which was the pincushion I blogged about in the last post. From Thursday, through today I've been working on my scrap quilt.

 I spent Thursday and Friday evening sewing the rows together (lots of seams to match).

 Friday night and Saturday found me making these weird triangle blocks (which were so totally not forgiving it was crazy!). Of the 160 I meticulously measured and stitched, I wound up ripping apart 55 because they didn't fold out to the corners. Then it took me tearing out about 8 of the first 18 re-sews to realize that regardless of my meticulous measurements of each block, the key to success was sewing a SCANT quarter inch seam.

On Saturday I stitched those 160 weird triangle blocks into 40 diamond blocks that also had a need for precise alignment.

 Today, I risked Carpal Tunnel by cutting out 980 2" squares to use on the 2nd border of the quilt.

This put a serious dent in the Kaffe Fassett stash...so much so that it had to be moved to a smaller storage box, which also required that it all be refolded (of course). But I enjoy refolding, so it also served to satisfy that loose guideline of mine.

So this is where we are now. I've got to make a flange to go between the center and the first border (the diamond units), and then I can move on to making the scrappy 2" square border.

I'd better fire up the iron and get back to work.  Check back tomorrow for a little more about my New Years' Guidelines.

Stay warm! And enjoy Downton if you're a fan.