Progress, procrastination and progress

No more excuses, progress needed to be made, so I manned up, or womanned up I should say, and got stuck into quilting the navy man's quilt.  Here it is all pieced and ready for basting

and this is how it looks now that it's quilted and bound.

Sorry about the light in all these pics!

More wavy line quilting (it's becoming a favourite) - this time on the diagonal.

Just need to finish handstitching the binding and add a label but I can get to that in front of the telly some evening.  It's purpose is to gift to my dad who is retiring at the end of this month, but we are wondering if he'll sit still for long enough to actually make use of it!

Then, after this little bit of progress I looked around and saw these again -

I know I need to start this quilt but I just couldn't bring myself to do it, so there followed a few hours of procrastination during which the following "play" occurred.

Two tea bag wallets

and a zippered pouch

The tea bag wallets are cute, quick and fun.  I kind of went with the flow and just stitched them up as I went along, but if you'd like a wee tutorial for them you'll find one on Karen's blog.

The pouch was a bit of a trial run and as I didn't like these fabrics so much I deliberately chose them to practice the bow effect with. However, as I worked with them they kind of grew on me and I quite like them now.  There are lots of things I'd do differently if I wanted to make this little pouch up again but it's neat, the zip ends are good and it'll be fine.

After this I looked around again and yup, the pinks were still there!  So, what's my problem with the pinks?  What is it that is making me avoid this quilt even though I know I need to make it and actually I do want to make it?

It's all about the pattern.  I have thought and re-thought so many different patterns for this quilt and just could not make up my mind.  Then I'd leave it for a few weeks and find another pattern and think that one to death too.  The thing is, I want this quilt to be right - not too traditional, not too modern, not too plain, not too fussy.  It has to work for its recipient (don't they all), and it has to work for me given the limitations of my fabric budget and my time resources, and I want it to be fun.  I don't want this to be a serious quilt, am I making any sense?

Well, before lunch I did it.  I MADE UP MY MIND!  I enjoyed the pattern of the navy man quilt (see above) and how it came together and then I remember seeing something similar but with angled wedges like windmill blades.  I think they might also be called whirlygigs, but of course now that I want to find them online I can't.  So, it was out with the calculator and the scrap fabrics to stitch up a test block -

For a simple looking block this was a bit of a tester on the old sizing front!

Wee bit more complicated that I thought at first glance, but I liked the finished look, picked up the rotary cutter and went for it.

So now I have windmill wedges like this

I trialled a first layout -

Not so keen on the way the darker windmills seemed to clump together a bit in places, so I tried another diagonal layout

Much better!  And so here we are, my afternoon's piecing is ahead of me and this quilt is officially in progress.

Haaaaaaaaaaaaa! (Big sigh of relief.)

So tell me folks, are you always good at making decisions about your quilts or do you ever/always struggle with things?  Has it ever taken you two months to work out how to make a start like this one?