Making Progress

I've been working hard!  Here's my progress:

Confusing Colors

I have been working on Lance's Wildlife quilt.  Here's my progress:

Twelve square-in-a-square fussy cut deer pictures, surrounded with diamonds.  Now the tricky part.  There are 6 different fabrics, so I didn't understand why this was so difficult!!  I wanted NO REPEATS of similar blocks--ie, no two with the same colored diamonds matched to the same colored corner triangles.  I wanted each of the fabrics to be spread out within the quilt, with good contrasts and unique colorizations, is that too much to ask???  I cannot say how many times I switched diamonds on different blocks, or traded the corner triangles in the squares-in-a-square.  I even added a 7th fabric, one set of diamonds, and one set of corner triangles, and thought that would solve everything.  A little extra diversity!  But no, it didn't help all that much!  Even the arrangement in the photo above is not the final arrangement!  (Not enough contrast in the bottom row!)  I have spent at least 3 hours trying to figure out and balance colors!  I finally just gave up and found a somewhat acceptable arrangement, knowing that there will be black corners on the diamonds, so the diamonds don't actually touch the corner triangles or each other.  I am hoping when all is said and done, it'll look decent!

Wildlife Quilt for Lance

I know, I know.  My design wall hasn't been cleared for even a single day yet, and here I go with something new.  I'm gonna TRY to get this new project done for Christmas.  I think I can, I think I can!

I have wanted to make a quilt for Bob's son, Lance, for awhile now.  He is an avid hunter.  Deer, turkey, fish.  Shotguns, rifles, bow and arrows.  So that being said, a wildlife theme is perfect for this project, AND I have lots of fabrics already that will work.  Fabrics left over from past wildlife quilt projects, some of which I never even used yet!  I winnow and sifted through the STASH and pulled all the possibilities.  WOW.  I have a LOT of fabric!

  The pattern I want to use is a modified Storm at Sea, something like this.  These are 12 inch blocks, with a 6-inch pieced border to extend the pattern a little further out.  Like with Max's quilt, my eye wants to see a finished circle!  If it goes as planned, it will finish off around 72 x 96".  It should go fast, because, the blocks are large, and each block doesn't have too many patches.  I am hoping it will look good and not too "empty."  The yellow square in the 12 square-in-square blocks is where I will put 12 wildlife pictures. My prints are all leaves, tree bark, trees, etc.  I'm hoping all my selections will look good together once the quilt is done.  I'm not very good at mixing color combinations.  The large diamonds that form each circle will each be a separate fabric (I might have to repeat a couple fabrics.) so the circles are more pronounced.  It will look more like this picture I think:
The 4 smaller square in a square blocks will have some sort of green as a background.  Different greens I think.  Originally I thought all the same green, but after having made one square to try it out, I think each of the 4 small squares will be backed in the same green, so it will look like one larger green block with 4 small featured "leafy tree prints," which are tan or brown. I have a lot of green leafy batiks.  A lot of this quilt is still in the thinking-stage, and so things are subject to change as the quilt evolves during the sewing process.

 From the deer panels that I have, I was able to find and fussy-cut  12 six inch pictures.  I'm really glad I could work out all deer, and not have to use a moose or a bear picture just to fill out 12 blocks!  I'm glad to have something on my design wall again.  I have so many quilt kits I need to do, but this quilt come first!  I hope Lance will like it!

  

2-Block Quilt Top is Finished!

I have been working on the borders these past few days, and have decided to go with the darker blue.  It has that hint of purple in it, and I really like that in the quilt.  I don't think the "floral" pattern is that noticeable, looks more like Nature--leaves and grass, clovers!  Clovers are purple flowers, but definitely not a girly kind of  flower.  Here's how it looks.

Now to pin it, and get it quilted before Christmas!

Amish Error

In case you are not familiar with "Amish Errors", I will fill you in!  Amish women are renowned for their beautiful hand-sewn quilts.  But if the quilt appears that it will be "perfect" when it is finished, with no mistakes showing, Amish women will typically put a "mistake" in the quilt on purpose.  "Only God can make something perfect," and if a woman ends up with a perfect quilt, she has just equated herself with God, which is totally unacceptable! Thus, the "Amish Error!"  A PLANNED "error."  Just like I plan to do with Max's 2-block quilt!  Because...!

Well, of course, I changed up the pattern of the 2-block quilt halfway through the sewing! I decided to put all those extra half blocks (a pieced border, actually) to all 4 sides of the quilt so the quilt border will begin at the end of the "circles", with the star points touching the border.  My quilts always "morph" into something different than when I started! The  problem with doing this is that I was "3 whiskers short of a cat" when it came to the gray fabric! I needed just SIX more HST's to complete the pattern I had in mind.  SIX!!  That is such a tiny bit of fabric, but I couldn't come up with it, not even in the scraps.  What a dilemma!  Everything else was ready, all the other units were sewed.  I racked my brain on how to proceed.  Many scenarios floated through the fog of my  disappointment and I came up with this:

IF I ripped out the 4 corner HST's from each corner of the quilt, and replaced them with 3 1/2" squares of purple, the corner would look like a square corner in the border (acceptable!  I tried it.  You can see the difference n the photo below.  The upper left HST is still there and not yet replaced.  The upper right has been replaced with a purple square, and it looks just fine! )  I would gain 2 gray/white HST's by replacing them with purple squares.  That's a lot of work for 2 very small patches, but I'm desperate!! If I did that, I would only need 4 more gray/white HST's. I could substitute a different gray print very close in value.  I could make 4 HST's from that gray, and put them in 2 corners where they would not be as noticeable. ...  OK, let me try that and see how it looks... I can just call it my "Amish Error!"  Can you find the "Amish Error" in my quilt?!

I'll zoom in a bit...See it now?

Look at the Gray/White HST's in the corner!  Yes!  A different gray fabric!  BARELY noticeable!!  Here's a close-up.

I will keep this plan and finish the quilt.  There is one more set of these gray/white HST's in the diagonal corner which you can't see here.  And if per chance someone notices and comments, we'll just compliment them on their attention to detail and tell them Congratulations!  You found the Amish Error! 

When I post the pic of the finished quilt, look for The Amish Error again!   It blends in so well, I bet you'll forget all about it!

(Oh, by the way, I have decided to use that royal blue "floral" print for my outer border after all! Looks nice, don't you agree?)

Floral Borders?

I have all the blocks and the rows sewn together for the 2-block quilt.  But now, when I put up the fabric I had planned to use, the darker blue,  I am wondering if the fabric is too "flowery" for a boy's quilt.  The blue color is perfect, a rich royal blue with spots of purple blended in.  Used for the star points, you don't notice the floral pattern too much, the floral design is all cut apart and it looks more like a Nature print as opposed to a floral print. Here is a swatch of the fabric (it looks lighter in this picture):

I have asked a lot of people for their opinions, and it's a mixed review.  Some just point blank said no, it's for a BOY, you don't use florals for a boy!  Some said, Use it, it's fine.  Boys like flowers, and true, some boys do.  But this is for Max, a 12 yr old grandson, Boy through and through! He plays 8th gr. football and he's still in 7th gr. for goodness sake!  Someone said boys don't notice details like that, and another said you can barely make out the flowers, so go ahead, use it!  Gahhh!  How to decide!?

So I auditioned a couple of fabrics.  The medium blue in the 9-patch (on the left), and the dark blue (floral?) in the star points (on the right..)  I have enough fabric to make borders from either.  Here's the audition:

I'm gonna have to think about this some more, but personally, **I** like the darker blue on the right...

Progress

I have been plugging along with Max's Christmas quilt. Bob has been sick this fall, and so I haven't had as much time to sew as I wish.  But the 2-block quilt is very nice  to work on, it's not a complicated quilt, but very pretty, and I find it an easy way to relax after a stressful day.  Here's how it looks up on my design wall so far:

I have all the unit pieces cut out and sewed, now it's just a matter of sewing them into 9-patch blocks.  I have all of the B-blocks done and am now working on the A-blocks.  

2017 Darlington Quilt Show

The Darlington Quilt Show was this weekend.  There were over a hundred entries, I entered Something Blue, Whirligigs, and the Pot Holders.  VERY EXCITED to say that Something Blue won the Viewers' Choice Award, so I have a second award winning quilt! (The Harry Potter quilt won in 2013.)  We had a good turnout for the show, the raffle quilt was won by someone in Darlington so it stays local.  AND  the Author Quilt was also taken off the wall in the Darlington Public Library and put on display in the quilt show as well!  So I'm very pleased with the show this year.

Here are MY entries in the quilt show:

 

 

One thing different about the quilt show this year was that we had a quilt appraiser, Sandy Schweitzer, do a "Quilt Walk", where anyone who was interested could walk with her at a scheduled time through the quilt displays, and she would talk about certain quilts that she thought were outstanding, or interesting, or had something to teach us about "the good, the bad, and the ugly" of random quilts on display.  It was all very interesting, and I learned a lot.  She stopped at both Something Blue and Whirligigs on the Quilt Walk and had a little bit to say about each:

     Something Blue--the "style" is very popular in this day and age, and even though the quilt is beautiful, well-constructed, and is challenging to make, it would probably not raise much money in an auction as it can be purchased at a lower cost in many places. You would probably not get your money's worth, not even to cover the cost of materials in making the quilt, to say nothing of your time and effort.  The market has a glut on these kinds of paper-pieced quilts.

     Whirligigs is a "fun" quilt, but hard on the eyes.  "You cannot look at it for too long" because the colors are so bright and the background black offers too much contrast. (bright against bright).  "There is nowhere for the eyes to rest, so they will tend to drift out of the quilt, perhaps to the wall, or a neighboring quilt."  You want to have good contrast, but also something that will bring the eyes INTO the quilt, not out of it,  

Also, neither of these quilts have labels. (bad!)  

That's ok, I still like my quilts!  :)

Pot Holders

Now that I have finished the Something Blue, and the Fan Quilt is still on the design wall, I decided to do a fun little project before I jump into the heavy duty quilting projects again.  I saw this really cute "beer" fabric at Heidi's quilt shop and couldn't resist.  I've been thinking about pot holders as potential Christmas gifts, and the beer fabric would be perfect for the men chefs in my family!

I've never made pot holders before, but Heidi was helpful in telling me what I might need.  Only thing I didn't have was "Insul-brite," which is the heat reflective material that is used inside the pot holder to protect your hands from the heat.

Heidi didn't have this particular kind, but something similar on a bolt, so I bought a yard of it and some beer fabric, and came home to play!  Little projects like this are fun because they finish up quickly, and are easy to do.  And you have a quick gift.  The only tricky part was making a loop with the binding.  I'm sure there must be a simpler way than how I did it, but I am satisfied.

The pot holders have 4 layers:  the backing, the batting, the Insul-bright, and the top which can be a pieced block. (This would be a good way to use up orphan blocks.)  I started my potholders with 10" squares and after all was said and done and trimmed, they ended up just slightly larger than 9".

Here they are, 4 so far.  I will be giving these in pairs, so  I have 2 gifts done for Xmas!  (SHHHHH!  Don't tell!)

HST's

Working on Max's quilt, I have all the fabrics cut, and have been sewing the HST's.  I've been chain piecing these, and it goes pretty fast. I'm not a fan of chain piecing, generally, but in this case, since so many of the patches are the same, it works just fine.  I usually like to build and sew one block at a time.  It seems like I am making progress faster that way.  It's probably faster with chain piecing though.  Here are all the gray/white HST, getting squared up and trimmed to size.

Let me say one thing about making HST's.  The standard formula of  starting squares for HST's  is "finished size + 7/8".  I'm not overly concerned about wasting fabric with an extra 1/8" of an inch, so I use the formula "finished size + 1 inch."   I've tried it both ways.  That extra 1/8" in MY formula (finished size + 1 inch), gives you enough wiggle room to have a little "trim space" on all 4 sides.  You end up with a perfect HST.  AND it's easier to measure and cut! The "finished size + 7/8" formula is pretty exacting, and can leave you with a less than perfect HST.  There's no room for error.  Some people make them this way and don't trim them. Just use them however they turn out.  Much faster to skip the trimming step, but unless your quarter inch seams are perfect, and your cutting is exact, do yourself a favor and go the extra mile... I mean, 1/8"--- you'll be glad you did!

Max's Two-block Quilt

Now that Something Blue is finished, I am jumping in with Max's Christmas Quilt.  I have chosen a two-block quilt, which when combined, forms a secondary pattern.

Last Christmas, after Aidan received his quilt, there was a general discussion on who should get the next Christmas quilt.  Max and Landon are the two McGuire grandkids that don't yet have a quilt from me yet.  After the discussion, I asked Max what was his favorite colors.  Max said Blue and Maroon.  I asked what color was "maroon" (it can range in a lot of variations from cranberry to purple), and Max said it was a dark purple.  Ok, I can deal with those colors.  A little later on, Max came up to me and said he really would like "blue and maroon 'underwear'" for Christmas next year. (A private joke there, involving the colors in Aidan's quilt.  He wanted to know why I wanted to know his favorite colors, and I said so I would know what color "underwear" to buy him for Christmas.  He DID get red and blue underwear, that was the joke, but also a red and blue quilt...)

Ok, so back to the 2-block quilt.  These are the two blocks:

 

Light blue, dark blue, Very dark blue, purple, gray and white.  They combine into a quilt that looks something like this:

It's not a complicated quilt, only 2 blocks, and both blocks are 9-patches, one has V-blocks, one has HST's. I DID add an extra "row" to the top and bottom, to help round out the circley-parts.  I think I may also add that same kid of a row to the sides. That way, all the blue stars will have all four points on them. Notice how the side stars run into the purple inner border, and are missing that last point?  This would add 6 inches to the width of the quilt.

I've been cutting fabrics, I have all the fabric I need already in my stash.  That's really nice!  I won't have to buy any fabric.  I might even have a piece of backing fabric that will work.  Gotta check on how big it is though.  This quilt will wind up being around 76" x 91."  Or 82 x 91 if I add on the extra "rows" to the left and the right of the quilt.)  A good size for a 13-yr old.

Something Blue is Finished

Today I cut the final thread of the Something Blue quilt!!  Officially finished, measuring @ 85" x 85.  It took me 7 1/2 months to do.  And what a finish it is!  This quilt  is beautiful on BOTH sides!  It almost looks like a "whole cloth" quilt on the back, with all the quilting.  I am so happy with this quilt.  The binding went on perfectly.  I wasn't sure how this would work because I cut rounded corners, and then needed bias-cut binding strips for them.  It went so well that I will probably only use rounded corners on my quilts in the future!  No mitered corners to worry about with all their thickness and  touch-ups!

Here it is, front and back:

 

Raffle Quilt Finally Finished

After a long and frustrating time of working with the Quilt Committee, the Log Cabin Star quilt is FINALLY done.  A lot of this quilt had to be ripped out and redone. The committee majority decided to have the quilt guild ladies sew the blocks.  I was in the minority here, but we had built in a "fudge factor" and made extras of each block, "just in case."  Thank goodness!  That saved us.  Some of the blocks were unusable.  One committee member sewed the blocks together, this part also had to be redone as the quilt didn't even halfway resemble a star.  Someone else sewed the borders on.  Someone with a long arm quilted it.  I put the binding on.  Just seemed like a big hodgepodge to me.

I put the binding on today, and that went very well.  It was the first time I ever sewed on a binding without having to go back and redo a section, or fix anything!  I was so happy!! Despite all the problems,  I have to admit, the quilt is very pretty, the fabrics are gorgeous and very high quality.  It's also BIG!  Around 104" square!  This will be a nice quilt to win!  I am just glad it is done and I don't have to work in a quilt committee for another 2 years!  I guess I am OCD about certain things, and I had to swallow my opinions about the quality of  other people's work. I need to work on that more.

Anyway, here is the finished quilt.

Want to buy a raffle ticket?  One dollar each, or 6 for $5.00!  

Borders for Something Blue

My extra fabric for the Something Blue quilt came finally.  There was a  problem with the light blue I ordered for the skinny border, and I had to choose something else.  The fabric I ordered in place of my light blue raindrop fabric turned out to be too green, so booo, now what?  After auditioning numerous fabrics, I decided to use a strip of the backing fabric for this border.  What do you think?

The turquoise strip bring out more of the turquoise colors in the batiks of the quilt fabrics.  There's a good contrast too.  I love it!  This is the one!  Ok, back to the sewing machine I go!  There's lots to do if I want to have this done by the middle of September!

Whirligig is Finished!

There is a quilt show coming up in September, and I have been working to finish at least ONE quilt to enter in the show!  (At the quilt show 2 years ago, I entered 5 quilts!) I make a lot of quilts, but end up giving them all away! I will ask Aidan if I can borrow his quilt (Argyle) that I gave him last Christmas to put in the show.  I also gave a quilt to Drew (Asteroid), but won't ask him to send it up from Georgia. Too bad, that is a beautiful quilt too! I am working on Something Blue, but don't know if I can finish it in time.  The could be the Fan quilt to enter, if Dianne and I get it put together in time for me to quilt it. Sooooo!  Whirligig is my only entry so far! I finally finished it, and it turned out really really nice!

I quilted it with black thread.  This was, for me, a bold and risky color choice, as it WILL show --black thread against bright colors!  The backing fabric is black, so that looks great.  If there were any tension problems, you just can't see them!  I echoed the shapes of the whirligigs, but it's not a continuous line, so there was a lot of breaking of thread and knots.  I will do it differently next time. But it still looks ok.  Here it is:

How to Sew PARTIAL SEAMS

Here is the block I've called the "chained pinwheel."

The "frame" pieces in the Chained Pinwheel enclose the pinwheel in an offset way.  These need to be sewed with what is known as a "partial seam".

First, sew the Center Pinwheel entirely.

Next, sew the "frame strips", you'll need 4 of them.  You will be matching the squares which will form the chain links to the appropriate corner in the above pinwheel picture.

Next will you will sew the first strip to the pinwheel.  The first strip is only "partially sewed", thus the name "partial seam."  Match the colored square to the same colored triangle.  Sew until you are about 1 or 2 inches from the end of the pinwheel.  Backstitch to secure, cut the thread.  There will be a "flap" that you will be able to move out of the way later.

Rotate you block 90 degrees clockwise.  Align your second frame strip, matching the corner colors.  This strip will fit the block, sew the entire length as usual.

Rotate you block 90 degrees clockwise.  Align your third strip, matching the corner colors, sew the entire length.

Rotate you block 90 degrees clockwise.  Fold the "flap" from Frame strip 1 out of the way.  Align your 4th and last strip, matching the corner colors, sew the entire length.

Now you can go back and finish sewing the partial seam from the first strip.  Fold the flap back into place, align the edges.  In the seamline, find your sewing line and your backstitch.  Starting a little before that backstitch, about a half inch or so, do another backstitch to secure this new line of stitching, start sewing again, right over the first backstitch, and sew to the end of the strip. 

Voila!  Your block is complete, and beautiful no doubt!

More Fan Blocks

Now that my design wall is empty AGAIN, I made a few fan blocks for the quilt Dianne and I are working on together.  Here they are:

I'm supposed to make 22 more, and here are 8, so 14 left to go.  They don't take long, maybe around 15  or 20 minutes each.  The hard part is deciding what fabrics to use.  We are trying not to repeat any fabrics.  There are a FEW repeats though, because Dianne and I have some of the same fabrics, and we each used them.  No one will notice!  OR it could be a game.... "can you find 2 fabrics that are alike??"  I think I have run out of large enough scraps, and have graduated to Fat Quarters.  I like making these blocks, and all of them together are so colorful!  Who will get this quilt?????

Charity Quilt

While I'm waiting for my extra Something Blue fabric, I decided to work on a charity quilt that my quilt guild was talking about.  It's called "Hats of Hope," an organization that gives hats and quilts to babies in the mountains of the tropics to keep them warm.  Whoever thinks babies get cold in the TROPICS???  But they do, in the higher elevations.  It's COLD in the mountains!

 

The quilts have to be small, around 36-40 inches.  I whipped his baby quilt up in a couple days.  It was small enough to pin on my dining room table.  It's made up of a one-yard cut of "outer space and aliens" fabric, and the back is pieced from flannel scraps I had left over from another quilt.  The binding is also made from leftover scraps.

Detail of the Quilting.

The Finished quilt!

The Backing and Binding.

Back to the Blue!

I have enjoyed working on my Something Blue quilt, and had finished the quilt as it is shown in the kit.  It's beautiful!

It measures only 71" x 71", which I think is on the "smallish" size.  I like bigger quilts!  So I have devised a plan to add a border around the quilt, maybe like a 1" inner border and a 5" outer border, adding 12" to the quilt, so it would finish off at around 83" square.  Much better.  

Alas, I do not have enough fabric left over in the scraps to accomplish this.  The kit was very generous with it's fabric, you could easily recover from an error if you cut a strip too large (or 7 strips, which is what I did!  Oops!)  So I emailed the designer and asked her if I could buy extra fabric.  She answered immediately and sent me a link to a quilt shop in New Hampshire that sells her fabrics.  I went to the website and found the fabric I needed and ordered it!  Hooray!  Now I just have to wait for it to arrive!

Quarter Quilt

Our Quilt Committee has been working, and we have 1/4 of the raffle quilt put together.  Here it is.

I copied this photo into Paint, rotated it and pasted it 3 times to show what a finished quilt would look like.  Up to now, we really didn't have a good idea of what it was going to look like!  Here it is!

I'm not overly thrilled with it.  I think it has too much white in it.  But everyone else loves it, so that's good.  It's too late to change it now anyway. I'll be glad when this project is over.  I really don't like working on committees.  We had to redo several blocks that the girls from the quilt guild sewed, and there were three that we couldn't use.  Our "fudge factor" proved extremely valuable, because not only did we have that extra half inch all around to help square up the blocks, but we had made 3 extra kits for each block, "just in case."  Guess what!  Just in case happened.  The directions on the blocks said "DO NOT TRIM THE BLOCK."   Yep,  someone trimmed the blocks, and badly.  We did not have to remake those blocks because we had 3 extra, so we had enough.  Why can't people just READ and FOLLOW DIRECTIONS??  Committees frustrate me.  I thought it was a bad idea to have everyone in the guild make these blocks.  Maybe I am just too much of a perfectionist when it comes to making quilts. 

OK, enough of this rant.  It's not good for the spirit!

Quilt Guild 2017 Raffle Quilt

I am taking a break from my Something Blue...

I belong to a quilt guild, the Lafayette County Sew 'n Sews.  We meet the second Monday of every month.  Every two years, we have a quilt show in September.  Last time, I was one of 6 ladies on the quilt committee to make, promote, and raffle off a quilt as a fund raiser for our guild.  Time flies when you're having fun, and September is sneaking up on us.  We've been talking since January in the Guild about getting a committee together to get started on this year's quilt, but talk is all that's taken place.  Now it's getting closer, and time is more important.  A few of us started the committee ourselves.  We made a Facebook Committee page, posted our meetings, and invited the committee members from last time.

We decided on some kind of a log cabin quilt.  We chose this picture as a model for our quilt.  It's a version of the Broken Star quilt pattern.  We only had this picture to go on, no pattern. I have EQ7, so it became my job (somehow) to make up the pattern.  We had some fabric already that we wanted to use, fall colors, beautiful golds and creams and rusts.  Most of it with metallic gold flecks or specks.

 

The first thing I did was make a grid after studying the the picture, and discovered that there were 4 types of blocks, which I labeled A, B, C, and D.  "A" blocks were dark/dark, "B" blocks were light/light, "C" blocks were medium/light, and "D" blocks were dark/light.  From this, I made a block in EQ7, and after much experimentation, colored it with the appropriate colors:

The 4 center A blocks are slightly different form the rest, so that our beautiful black and gold paisley could take center stage.  This paisley will also be the borders all around, so we needed the black to separate that in the corners, so the paisley in the blocks wouldn't fade into the paisley in the borders.

Next, I made a pattern for each block. We then decided which fabrics would go where.  This step was actually done at a committee meeting at the local quilt store where we could pull other fabrics that looked good together and would complement our other chosen fabrics.  

I then made 5 sample blocks, one of each kind.

  

   

4 "Center A" blocks form a star.

One of the last things we did was calculate how much of each kind of fabric we needed, and cut our strips and pieces.  Whew!  What a process!  Sixty-four zip log bags now hold the directions and pieces for our blocks.  We will pass these out to the quilt guild ladies next week at our April meeting, so that everyone who wants to can help with this project.

 We made our outer strips of each block an inch wider than necessary so that we will have a built-in "fudge factor" when trimming the blocks to 12.5 inches.  We have learned from experience that 12.5" can mean anything from 11.5 to 13" or more!  Not everyone sews with the same accurate quarter inch seam!  After trimming the blocks,  the committee will meet again and sew the finished blocks into rows, and rows into the top.  Hopefully, all will be finished by June so we can promote the quilt and sell raffle tickets in advance.  We don't even know what it will look like yet.  This is a TRUE MYSTERY QUILT!!!!  I hope it turns out ok.  It's a lot of wasted effort if it turns out to be an ugly quilt and no one wants to buy a ticket for it!