I must confess

This summer has not been very productive for me as far as quilting goes. I hope to get back into the swing of it soon, as I have so many tops needing quilting, as well as a stack of quilts I would like to begin. But, since I have not been quilting, I have had little to blog about either. That makes me sad.

So I will share with you today the truth about one of my unfinished quilts. It is a round robin top that I received back last year. I blogged about it here when it came home to me. I really liked the overall feel of the top when it arrived home. The colors are great and I love the variety of the different rounds. But, I found the top to be a bit unsettling. So, I put it aside, thinking that maybe I just needed to add a final round to it.

This is the top as it arrived home to me.

When I pulled it back out earlier this year, I knew instantly why I had never finished the quilt. The outer border was "off". It was not symetrical . I felt terrible about re-doing someone else's hard work but I just couldn't keep it as it was. So, the control freak in me won out. I pulled the border off and rearranged the blocks so that they made a border that flowed more to my liking.

But once I got it all stitched back together, something still wasn't right.

Yikes! How could it be? Had I not put it back together right? I stared at it for a while then walked away. When I returned to the top, once again the answer was obvious. There was another round of blocks that was not behaving as I would like it to. I just hadn't noticed earlier because of the outer border issue.

Once again I struggled with the concept of re-doing someone else work. After all, isn't that the whole idea of a round robin- to have contributions from other quilters? But, I caved to the inner control freak (don't tell my husband; he thinks he's the control freak of the family ;) ). I ripped out the offending blocks and rearranged them to my liking before putting it all back together again. Sigh. At any rate, here is the after picture of the top.


I hope I haven't offended those lovely ladies who worked on my round robin. I imagine that I probably have. So, I do apologize for that. But, the truth is, I would never finish this quilt if I hadn't made the changes. And that would have been the bigger offense.