Because I Matter

When Tracey posted about wanting some motivation to create things for herself, I had to agree.  While I love the VQBs and swaps I’m participating in, projects for me can be pushed to the side. 

So I signed up for the Because I Matter Challenge, and will submit my progress at the end of each month this summer.  And since I’m going to be gone the last 10 days in August, I’ll really have to crank.  Unfortunately, May wasn’t really at all about me.  But I did get work on some “me” projects.

Here’s where I am with the never-ending quilt project (I started this sometime early/mid-2008), the huge 100×100 quilt I’m making for our bedroom from Flutterby fabrics. You can see my rough design in the photo – I wish I had EQ6, I could scan in the fabrics and have a much better representation.  I have all of the 4-patch pieces sewn and attached to one piece of the dragonfly fabric (top right), along with the more subtle teal + dragonfly pieced (bottom right).  What I worked on this month was framing the teal fabric (bottom center), which I need to iron and sew the other sides (left strips) of the 8×8 blocks.  Then I can begin to layout the pieces.  I’m planning to separate the quilt into quadrants, and work on a quad at a time before putting it all together.  There’s lots and lots of ironing to be done – my other goal is to kill our current iron so I can get a new one!  It would be really awesome if I could get this done by the end of the year – I don’t know if I have the motivation to let it drag out any longer!  Good thing this is my primary challenge project!

Next “me” project on my list…  This month, I cut the pieces for the Amy Butler Birdie Sling to make for myself – I had read online that the cutting takes a while.  Hopefully the bag construction isn’t too tedious!  I need to get this done ASAP, I’m tired of carrying around the current bag, lol!

And finally, I’m going to kill 2 birds with one stone…since I have no definite gift-giving plans for my Old Red Barn Co quiltalong quilt, I’m calling it a “me” project, and my goal is to stay on top of the quiltalong.  In theory, this quilt will be done by the end of June.  I’m definitely rolling right along – week 2 was cutting all of my fabrics into 2.5″ strips.  Now I know why I love ordering from Cynthia at www.etsy.fabricworm.com – her cutting is so accurate!  The pieces were cut so straight, that I had no issue getting 7 of the 2.5″ cuts out of each half yard.   

As an added bonus, each of the 12 prints had the selvedge attached, so I knew exactly what fabrics I ended up with (they were so pretty in the pictures, I didn’t bother to figure out what I was buying):

No guarantees on this one, but I may actually keep these selvedges and make a pillow out of them to match the quilt!  (In case you were wondering, the top 4 prints are Amy Butler Midwest Modern or Lotus, the next 4 are Valerie Wells Del Hi, and the bottom 4 are Alice Kennedy’s Strawberry Fields.)

EDIT: I’m also going to add my duplicate blocks of the VQB blocks to my project list.  Basically, I’m trying to make a similar block to each block I make for another person in one of my VQBs.  As I mentioned in this post, I’m only 5 for 11 (and I think I’ve lost one of the 5), so I would like get caught back up.  These blocks are going to be made in a crazy sampler quilt (or 2) as a commemoration of all the work I did for the VQBs.