Neon Mess

This quilt is a mess, but I’m finally O.K. with that.

The saga began over a decade ago. Having made my first real quilt at my Grandma’s house in the summer, I was itching to make another one all on my own, the only problem was that fabric was hard to come by in my area. My best option was a local market. I was still in school and didn’t have the time, patience, or transportation to go fabric hunting so I got whatever I could find the one time I went out. Naturally, I found colors and fabrics I disliked. Over time, they’ve grown on me, but I was originally very against these fabrics and colors.

These poor fabric squares were put through trial by fire. I cut every square out individually because I didn’t know any better. I didn’t have the right fabric cutting tools, I ironed instead of pressing, and I was constantly pulling on them because my mom’s old machine was essentially broken. I would sew one or two blocks and proceed to fight the machine for twenty minutes until I got it working again. Needless to say, I didn’t get very far.

The project ended up in a box and I worked on it periodically but never got far. Five years later, I acquired my own machine and began other projects. Fast forward a few more years and the project finally got moved from it’s original home to my new house where it promptly sat in a closet because I didn’t know what to do with it and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to quilt it well at all.

I know it looks fine from a distance, but truly, the quilt is so warped and stretched that there was no way to properly quilt it. I ended up doing a stitch in the ditch and I was constantly adding pleats or tucking the top fabric layer under itself. Oh well.

So what do you do with a project you know is bad and will never be good, even if you take it all apart and start over? You turn it into an “I don’t care what happens to this” quilt. This is now the quilt that gets thrown in the car for trips to the beach or laid on the grass in the yard.