Done is Better than Perfect

I thought I’d jump in here and show you that I have actually been doing some sewing.  And I have a finished quilt top to show for it!

You know how bloggers show a picture and say that it looks crooked because of the camera angle?  Well, this quilt looks wonky because it is!!  It will present a real challenge for “quilting out the bumps” as they say.  But that particular headache is for another day, because this one was its own headache!

I inherited a set of 9-degree wedge rulers, and decided to give them a try.  I figured it would be a great way to use up scraps if I sewed long strips and cut the wedges from there.  I played around in Electric Quilt and came up with this layout and thought it would look pretty good.

Well.

For my first try using these rulers, I probably should have used a solid fabric instead of strips.  But you know what they say about hindsight.  So, it turns out that with all the seams and such, each wedge was not quite exactly a 9 degree angle.  So when it came time to sew the curved seams in each block, there was some fudging to do.  A. Lot. of. Fudging!  In fact, I wound up stitching a gathering line at the inside circle edge to help made everything fit.  It’s kind of fun to try to smooth this top out – you get one circle flat, then the others all bump up.  Kind of like Whack-A-Mole!

And I don’t want to talk about the border!  Just . . . no.

I was really disgusted with this project and swore I would never use those rulers again.  But, now that it’s been hanging on my wall for a couple of days, I kind of like it.  So, maybe I’ll try another project with those rulers after all.

Just not anytime soon!