More on Tradition...

In case you're wondering how I'm doing on my Traditional quilt... In all honestly, I enjoyed the class very much. Linda Ballard is a fun and excellent teacher... full of humorous stories and lots of tips and tricks that one can only learn in a class. She provided an amazingly concise booklet of instructions as part of the class, and was hugely generous with her one-on-one time with each of us in the class. I'm very grateful for the experience of working with her.

On the other hand, as I'm now at home in the coziness of my studio and working on the nuts and bolds of constructing this quilt, I'm about to lose my mind. The name of the quilt is "Canine Stars" and, for the past week, I've been paper-piecing "dog teeth," and, let me tell you, it's been tedious to the max. On the other hand, since I'm in a rather fragile space in my life right now, the tedium caused by doing the same task over and over is sort of a good thing. Meaning... I don't have to think too hard about what I'm doing, and if my mind wanders away from the task at hand, which it tends to do a lot in recent weeks, that's okay.

The required number of dog teeth pieces for this quilt is 32. Today I finished #31, and deliberately stopped, in order to give myself the joy of knowing I only having one more to do. I can dive back into things tomorrow knowing I have ONE more act of paper piecing to do, and then I'm DONE. It's a good feeling.

Here are some of the 31 rows of teeth, including one of the layouts...

Tomorrow, I'll trim them all down to their required 6.5" x 2.5" size, and then on Saturday, at the quilt guild meeting, I'll rip the paper off during the business meeting, instead of dozing off as I usually do. Then I can come home and sew the teeth to their center pieces, and make the 16 required Dog Teeth panels.

THEN, I can start working on the stars. In all, I'm going to need 24 stars. Each star requires 4 Flying Geese. At 5 stars per block times 4 blocks plus 4 extra stars for the corners, that means I'm going to need to make 96 Flying Geese.

Oy.

This, my friends, is why I don't do "Traditional". How in the name of all that's holy, do people remain sane while making quilts like this on a regular basis??? However... it's a moot point, because I'm NEVER going to do this again!!!