motivation

Moving a couple of languishing quilt tops to the finished quilt column this year has felt pretty good. I still have more, and my new goal is to get all of them finished. I think it will feel like a clean slate and a great mental block removed! One of the quilting steps I like least is to make quilt sandwiches, so I decided to just have an irritating afternoon of smoothing, pinning, and obsessing over wrinkles so I could get the rest of the tops in the closet ready for quilting. 

I had purchased the backing to this gorgeous quilt as a 108, so thankfully there was no piecing required for this queen sized quilt. But no joke, it was a bear to put together. I ended up taping the batting to my (freshly cleaned) floor and then spreading the top out to line up those two layers, then transferring it to a cleared off (and also freshly cleaned) kitchen island to get it on the backing and pin it.

I am not totally confident it won't have some play in the back when all is said and done, but the only other solution I had was taping it all on the floor, pinning it there, and ruining my back and knees in the process. No thank you! This will do. 

Similar treatment was given to this smaller, though still quite large, solids quilt. I felt I finally got into a groove at this point, and stacking them on the couch looking so ready to go was really a thrill. 

At this point, given how large these two projects are, I ran into the bottom of my pin jar. Never have I ever! I remedied this by going out to get more, and I can't decide if I am embarrassed by having so many things on the go at once or pretty pleased with it. Regardless, I have TWO pin jars now. 

The next quilts I sandwiched were much smaller, just lap sized, and very quick to pin together. A piece of cake in fact! The pile grew in no time. I decided on the island because it was the largest spot I had for the big quilts, but I will definitely keep this in mind for any size. The counter height was so convenient, and really for a lap sized quilt or a wall hanging the surface is basically perfect. The backings hung off some and required some fiddling to get tight, but no worse than doing it on the card table upstairs. 

Looking at the pile of quilts ready to go is really quite something, and it was such a good idea to get multiple projects past this stage and into the "how do I quilt it" purgatory. Feeling motivated.