I don't know about you, but I often find that there's a sour spot somewhere in the middle of all the projects I do where I get really down on it. I see all the seams that are off, the colors are garish, the iron left a bad stain on one block, this is fugly and I could not possibly display it in public.

That's about where I am now with the Sun and Sky quilt.

Here's how it started:



I soaked the squares in very hot water, then dried them - mostly let them air-dry, but I also hit them with a hair dryer at the beginning in order to speed up the process. This did result in the loss of some yardage, but better now than once they were sewn into a quilt with a bunch of prewashed fabrics.

Then there was lots of arranging and rearranging and adding in more squares from my stash.



I'll spare you all the pictures of that.

At first my plan for this one was to cut all the charms in half, sew each half to an equal-sized white rectangle, and then do something cool with all of those squares, a la Crazy Mom Quilts. But once I started doing the math, I realized that the squares would be very small after squaring the charms, cutting them in half, cutting them down to squares again, then taking a 1/4" seam allowance. So I decided to go with a popular charm pattern (at least according to google image search) that involved making long strips of charms/half-charms and alternating the strips with white.

So I held my breath and chopped a bunch of solid squares into two unequal pieces,




And started rearranging again.




Bleh! Let's try that again.




A bit better, but maybe we should add in what will be the white space, and make the columns a little longer.


Close enough.

Now we're basted and ready to quilt.



And I'm feeling like it's almost too fugly to go on. But of course I will. Sometimes it turns out okay, and even if it doesn't, I'm glad to have the chance to see how my machine does with free-motion now that it's been serviced.