An Irish Queen

I love making a quilt. I'm not great at it, but I find something soothing about the math and the geometry and the labor. Throw in the fun of color selection and that sense of satisfaction you get when you create something, and you have a pasttime that can easily transform mindless tv time into legitimate function and useful hours. Everyone should have something like this. I know people that might do needlework or crochet or any hands on type project. There is something emotionally cathartic about the creation process, and it helps immensely if you aren't spending the time actually thinking about the emotions or the day or the bills or the complexities of life.

The problem with making a quilt, though, is that I won't actually force myself to sit down and enjoy doing it unless I have a purpose and a deadline. Otherwise, I can't justify doing something that I enjoy. And having a deadline takes away a little of the enjoyment. Its a bit of a catch 22, but I can overcome it easily if I love someone enough and have the proximity/time/money to focus on it. I have to put that disclaimer in here, because there are a number of people that I love to bits for whom I was not able to do a quilt. And I still kind of regret that.

But this is not about regrets! This is about success!

There is one quilt pattern that I am more familiar with, simply by right of having used it more often. I particularly like it because it looks way more complex than it is. ...uh, I mean, It is really complex and really really hard? Nope. I can't really lie here. This is easier than it looks. And it covers some of my faults as a quilter. I am terrible at matching up corners. No worries! There are so many corners on this that a few are bound to match up! And the pieces are so tiny, nobody should hold you accountable for matching ALL the corners. If I actually try to, I end up wanting to quit halfway through, making a ridiculously complex wall hanging or baby quilt instead of a queen size masterpiece.

Precision is not my gift. Endurance, yes. Accuracy, No.

So of course, if I am making a quilt, I would be excited to learn a new pattern, but I certainly won't discourage you if you say "remember that quilt you made for Brittany and Bryan?..." Because familiar territory is certainly easier to navigate. Even if it does involve little tiny 2 inch squares assembled into a queen size pattern.

It's called an "Irish Chain" but I had yet to do it as a true Irish Chain. You can vary with whatever colors you want, and most people have their own ideas as to the colors and themes, but a true Irish Chain is done in greens. And this time, with a wedding themed in green, and a bride who preferred the pattern she has already seen me do, I finally had motive and opportunity. And so a few months before the wedding I wentout and bought all the green necessary...

And for a month or so I procrastinated.

And then for a week or two I worked on it here and there

And then for another week of worked on it every evening I had available

And then for another week I cancelled everything else and spent every spare minute on it

And then for a week I stayed up until 1 or 2 in the morning every night until Friday rolled aong, and I had this:

Which was just finished enough to display like this:

Which was how everyone else saw it before I took it back home to actually finish it.

And it is still sitting on my living room floor, needing only about another hour worth of work. But you see, now I don't have a deadline anymore...