Sarah's Day Off!

As a birthday gift this year, Jared gave me a "Day Off."  He tries to let me have a day off a couple times a year, which is totally awesome.  Sometimes I do have to wait a bit to get my day off, which is why it didn't happen until June.  But I'll take it whenever I can get it!

I stayed up late last night working on my pictures and the family blog, so I slept in a bit this morning.  I took a shower, with no one knocking on the door with a crisis, which was quite nice.  I always plan waaaay too much to get done in one day and end up annoyed with myself, so this time I decided to just relax and not plan anything.  I played on the computer for a bit and did some reading, then I decided to get motivated and do something.

So, a looong time ago, I started a quilt for Tal.  The poor kid has been waiting for this quilt for years.  Literally, years.  I started making it when he was around 6, or maybe 5.  It's been a long time anyway.  It started out simple, just 8 x 8 inch patchwork stars.  I wanted to make each star different.  One fabric for the star and one for the background.   Then he grew, so I added more stars.  Then I found a pattern for a foundation pieced rocket ship.  And he grew some more, so I needed more blocks.  I decided to make the rocket ship blocks bigger than the stars because I thought it would look better and as a bonus, I wouldn't have to make so many blocks,  But he kept growing, so I kept having to add blocks.  By now, the quilt was getting much bigger than I had planned on.  I tried to figure out a way to quilt it in sections and then join the sections, but I couldn't figure out a good way to do it.  No matter what I did I was going to have to do some of the sewing by hand.  Ugh!  I hate hand sewing and I don't trust my hand sewing to be as durable as it will need to be for this quilt.  Trying to figure out how to join it was causing me to not be able to actually get anything done, so I scrapped that idea and sewed the entire top together.  I considered cutting the batting into sections to make it easier to quilt, but that just seemed like it was going to be a huge pain, so I scrapped that idea too.

Before I could get started with my most dreaded part of quilting, the basting, I had to do a little repair work to the top.  When I made the rocket ship blocks, I misjudged the fabric in a couple of spots, so the flames were missing a couple of points.   I faked them with yellow embroidery stitches.  And a couple of seams popped, so I had to fix those too.

I really, really, really, dislike basting, so I usually use safety pins.  But trying to safety pin an almost twin sized quilt wasn't going to work so well.  And I didn't have enough safety pins.  And I wasn't going to blow the afternoon driving to Joanns and back.  So, I laid it all out on the floor and basted it with thread.  Agh!

Of course, it wouldn't fit on the floor of my bedroom, so I had to come out into the living room to put it together.  The boys were all fascinated by what I was doing, so I had an audience.  They were all very good about not walking (or laying, or rolling around on) the quilt.  And I only stabbed myself once.  I didn't even get any blood on the quilt!

Taaaa Daaaaa!

By that point, my knees and my back were killing me, so I spent the rest of my afternoon finishing my book and trying to remember how to unbend.