Things I remember

This morning, well, it was to early to get up and to late to go back to bed.
So I went in to the quilt room to sew until daylight. Nothing to strenuous. Just finish up those Jelly Roll Strip blocks.
It has been steadily growing on me that this idea is not going to work well. The jelly rolls are
too limited, even though I snuck in a fabric strip or more to add some diversity. And this morning, while sewing up the last four sets, I was just about ready to quit and throw them in the garbage.
But then that cunning  inner brain reached out to me and said, "Remember? We have been here before."
It seems like most every quilt I make has stages. An idea, the collecting of fabrics, the growing sense of yes, its coming to gather, sewing, dismay and the discovery that something is wrong or it is just incredibly hideous. The hideous can hit at almost any point. Sometimes I even start with it as a challenge to my self. Often it is when I am looking at the completed quilt top and the disappointment wells up and disgust. Sometimes I just need to tweak it a bit, add something, study it for awhile and then take away something, change placements, whatever hits me that needs to be done. Sometimes, you just finish it up and when its quilted, it sort of comes alive again. It just needed more dimension.
Quilting does wonderful things for a quilt and sometimes just not much.
I have went through the stages of being in total awe of  a lovely machine quilted quilt. And I have envied their  talented joy of adding that depth, that dimension. But there is a change growing in me that is dissatisfied with that picture perfect quilting. I want to use instead a heavier thread,  a more primitive stich. Just something that says I made this. It did not come from a store display.
I need to iron these strip blocs and put them up on the design wall. But I was not supposed to start
this quilt yet, I still have my Portland Patches blocks on the design wall. To to hurry that process along some, I did what I have been procrastinating doing, I cut out the few half blocks that I needed to do from blocks that I have already sew and put them up on the wall. Ok. Its working.
Of course, I still have not found the material that I unpacked when I got back from Portland. The material that I need to do One MORE Melon block. Grr.
Its time for that nap.