Yay for Past Catherine

Well, it's been 8 days since my last post, in which I said that I needed to complete 1 flower each 6 days to stay on track. Unfortunately, I have not completed a single whole flower. However, I have started each of the 5 flowers I need to get me to halfway - see below (the 5th flower has less than a full seam done, but it's started!!). The top image was a fun surprise - apparently Past Catherine started working on this flower and then tucked it away again in the envelope, so when I pulled out what I was expecting to be single hexagons, the inner circle was already done! I can tell it must have been VERY EARLY in the process, because I stopped sewing them from the middle out like that after about the third flower...

In good and bad news, I don't have a lot of required sitting around to do between now and August 2, so I'll have to make my own opportunities to move things along. I am also starting to get REALLY BORED of hexagons. Maybe my incentive will be that I'll take a break at the halfway point and do something else crafty for a bit? Time will tell!

Full flowers: 27/64 (5 started)

- Catherine

Stay on target...

Thanks to planes, buses, porch chats, mom time, and catching up on work recordings in the last week, I am pleased to share my latest progress of *6* more completed flowers! See? [The red one is not a glitch in the matrix from last week's post - I have two redundant red flowers.]

This puts me only 5 flowers away from my goal of getting halfway done by August 9! As long as I can complete one every 6 days, I'll stay on track. In bad news (for the quilt, at least), I am done with flights until August, so I will have to be more proactive about carving out quilting time. In other bad news, I've completed all the partially-done flowers from previous posts - just 2.5 seams done on the newest flower (at the bottom of the photo) - so no easy wins in the near future.

It's tempting to start thinking about next steps - do I have all of the other fabric I need to complete the quilt? Do I start working on those hexagons and sewing them into small strips? Do I start imagining the overall flower layout? What will the actual quilting look like? But I will try to stay focused on just grinding out the flowers for now - still a long long way to go! 

Full flowers: 27/64 (1 started)

- Catherine

Un deux trois quilt

I made a concerted effort this last week to work on the partially-done quilt flowers whenever I could, with the result that I finished 5 more! The complete ones shown here were all the ones in the top photo from my last post, and the green strips occupied the rest of my time sewing with Mom yesterday (after finishing the yellow flower in the first ~30 minutes). With the greens and the five sets of strips from the lower photo in my last post, I'm poised to knock out a few more quickly. I also have yet more flights this coming week/weekend, and still more recordings to watch for work and some of our favorite sports on for the next month... hopefully lots of quilting!

In other motivational news, this batch of 5 puts me at ~1/3 done with all of the full flowers, an excellent step forward given that I was 1/4 done in just my last post. I will challenge myself to make it to halfway (32) by Aug 9. That might seem like a random choice but I will be flying home from an international destination that day; a good time to catch up if I'm behind. 

One additional reason I'm pleased I tried the "jump-starting" technique (see last post) which requires many needles is that it prompted me to find more needles; I found a packet of actual embroidery needles and WOW they are so much better to work with than the two I had been using, which makes the whole experience more enjoyable. I'm going to retire those original ones for other purposes.

Full flowers: 21/64 (6 started)

- Catherine