100 Day Project Update

So I managed to finish items 1-4 on my list of 5 sewing projects that I’d planned to work on last Friday. Yay for that! My Bondi top turned out only so-so, but my Free Spirit tank turned out pretty well. I’m hoping to take a couple quick photos of each tonight if I can sneak a few minutes between raindrops, and share them this week.

But today I want to talka bit more about my 100 day project. I’ve written snippets about it here and there, but since my last dedicated post about it ended with me saying I wasn’t really enjoying it, I’m long overdue for an update. If you follow me on Instagram you already know this, but in short, I narrowed my focus from “make a 5-inch block from scraps” to “make a 5-inch block from monochromatic scraps” and that has made ALLLL the difference. Immediately I went from not really liking my creations to really, really loving them.

When I was 20-30 days in, I decided to add a bit more structure to my project and started planning the end result — which will be a 10×10 quilt measuring ~45″ square. That’s a fairly small quilt, and I don’t know what I’ll do with it in the end. Maybe I’ll do a giveaway! That might be fun. But we’ll see. I’ve posted the photo below already, but it shows where I’m heading with less than 25 days to go. The rest of my blocks will be heavy on the blues to round out the right side of the quilt, with a few more pinks and green still needed.

I’m so, so excited to see this come together! Although I’ve completed at least one block every day, I’m still a couple blocks behind schedule because 1) I’m re-making the first 8 blocks that weren’t monochromatic and 2) each time I lay them all out like this, I find one or two that don’t quite fit in color-wise. They’ll be a bit too light, or a bit too dark, or a bit not-quite-the-right-shade-of-pink. But it’s easy to fix those — I usually just slice it in half, and add new stuff! Giving myself the freedom to tweak blocks days or weeks later has also contributed to my enjoyment of this project, and is a good lesson learned/note to self for creative projects in general I think. Freedom is good.

I’ve been trying to get on the longarm rental schedule for a while, but the shop I use has been booked with workshops recently (and my availability to drive over there is admittedly limited to a few days a month). I finally scored a slot on July 13, which is just a few days after this project ends. I may use this quilt as a practice piece, and want to try stippling. But will that be too much for such a busy quilt top? I don’t want to fall back on straight lines when I have the opportunity to push myself to try something new, but I also don’t want the quilting to overwhelm what’s already a pretty crazy quilt top. We’ll see!

Three weeks to go…