Imperfection is better than Unfinished

Machine quilting is enough to make a preachers wife cuss. No I'm not a preachers wife, but I did cuss a whole bunch today....it has been a battle with perfectionism! I was trying to quilt Sharon's pastel stripes. I repined it, ripped it out, repined it, ripped it out.... ughhhhhh! Its all puckery!

I finally just did it the best I could and “Imperfection is better than Unfinished” became my mantra for the day. What does one think about while making a quilt with puckers??? (when they aren't cussing)

This quilt has more puckers than a room full of babies sucking lemons.....

This quilt has more puckers than a nursing home on grand kids day.....

This quilt has more puckers than a politician running for office.....

This quilt has more puckers than a big girls wedding dress....

and finally This quilt has more puckers than the proctologist's waiting room!

That lead to thoughts of the bucking song (something we used to play on our radio show) so I had to find it and listen to it.

I still love it, puckin puckers and all. It is still very pretty. I ran out of thread so I have to finish it later This week.  this one was constipating the whole process, I had set it aside because it was frustrating me... but, it was using my safety pins and I couldn't pin the next one. I got it far enough along that I could pull the pins and move on to something else... until I buy thread. So... hopefully this week I can post a finish!

this is Irene. (with my two helpers Dee Dee and Sammie, Dee Dee the black and white is blind, Sammie is mute... they make quite a pair and they insisted on helping!) I started to make her for Irene victims but I never found anyone collecting quilts to send it to. BUT I did find a quilt store collecting quilts for the fire victims in Texas, so I pinned it, quilted it, and I will bind it in the next couple days and it is ready to send. Again, imperfection is better than unfinished applied, all I had was dark blue quilting thread... I think it would have looked better with white, but... dark blue is what I had, so I quilted it.... I looks better than I thought t would. (lol... again its pretty puckery too) why would I have preferred white, because with the dark blue you can see how crooked my lines are, but I've decided that were just going to call them organic.... It really is a pretty little scrap quilt. I backed it with a green sheet I had. I think it would make a nice boy quilt for them. Ralph helped me take the pins out of it and several times said “your really going to give this one away? I really like this one.”

I also have the tops for 2 of the 6 denim quilts finished and the pieces sewn into strips for a third one. I have been trying to figure out what to back them with and I've decided 10” squares from my scraps sewn together would work on all 6 of them. I need to find really thin batting, it needs something to cushion the hard seams, but it will be too big with puffy batting.

I also have a whole bunch of geese cut out for the paw paw kisses, and made a little progress on piecing the 2nd one. Finally a picture of my first flying geese!

I did learn things this weekend.

• If my thread is breaking all the time, its because the needle although it doesn't look bent, is bent.

• More pins and ironing would have helped a lot on the puckers (although Irene was ironed and had a ton of pins and I still ended up with puckers... just not as many) I am also going to try the spray glue on one, I will see if I like that better.

• I really don't like machine quilting. I don't have the money to send them to someone else and I'm going to have to quilt them somehow. I enjoy making them, creating them and I love the finished product. I am just going to have to push trough the quilting part. I do better on smaller quilts and after those baby quilts I was feeling pretty confident, this weekend totally smashed that! I'm going to keep trying to improve, I love free motion quilting, and I would love to get good enough at straight lines that I can try that... so maybe there is hope. But I think after these Christmas presents are done, I'm going to try my hand at hand quilting, it may take longer... but I think I will enjoy the process more!

Overall it was a productive weekend. I made a lot of progress on Sharon, I almost finished the donation quilt and expect I can finish both of them during the week. By the end of the week I will have 3 more in the flimsy finished and ready for quilting. I need batting, thread and sewing machine needles to continue to make progress on Christmas!! Until then I'm going to cut squares for the backings of the denim and the rest of the pieces I need for flying geese.