Exciting Moments

Patience has been a strong quality of many other people I know. Passivity is something I see as more of a challenging aspect for a few others. Neither of them are words I would use to describe myself and neither of them mean the same thing, though the appearance of someone sitting with patience and someone sitting passively tend to look alike.

Me? Well, I've always leaned toward action, toward presenting a more bold determined energy. And when I just went rushing out without a plan, I've had to either back-track or live with my choices.

First thing I did today was to work from my plan to measure and cut dark blue segments for the Constellations quilt. It was laid out on the design space until the new cat decided it was fun to slide on. I pulled the center piece out. The dark and light pieces are ready to pin. It would have been nice to work with the center as I go, however, I am not a person who scolds cats for being cats, so removed the slidey-fun.

Then, I took the Cat Paper Piecing center into one of the fabric stores in town to start gathering fabric for borders. I have a black, but need enough for two inside borders and one larger one. With all the colors used for the tessellating cats, it would seem any fabric would work, but after half an hour laying bolts out, I realized that was not the case. I've got a call into Amy asking for color and a sort of genre for the outside border. 

After getting back home, it was onto my Brother-In-Law's quilt, Winter Golfers. Its being made from vintage fabrics I got from Lee's estate. The very center is one of the panels my friend Carol gave me, and I've been adding specific borders from a quilt pattern idea I got from a Nov/Dec '07 issue of Quiltmaker originally called "Holiday Homes". It had a center panel of 4 house blocks in it that were the same size as the golf panel. The other change I made was to make it longer than square and did that by simply adding an inch or so of width to the top and bottom segments. It was meant to finish at 46x46 and I wanted it much larger but still a personal lap quilt.  I left it with great notes-to-self, so it was easy to pick up and work on again without needing to re-trace my steps. I've kept all the coordinating fabrics with the evolving topper in the event they were needed as borders. Its 30x40 right now.

One thing the pattern did was to use two different colors for one of the borders as a framing technique, as well as to add interest. That will be perfect because I didn't have enough red for the next border to make all 4 sides. The pieced border follows the pattern next. 

Not patience. Not passivity. Neither is it rash and unplanned action.

Calculators/Border was my next stop to get a visual and calculation of borders. To get to the size of 62x72, I need four borders measuring 3.5", 4.5", 5", and 3". There is enough fabric to do it. Eeehah!