Girl Quilts!

Since I have switched to working 4 days a week, it has only taken me a month to kind of get my mojo back.  I tried this work schedule in the winter (jan, feb, mar), and by the end of 3 months, I was starting to get bored in the evenings!  Imagine that!  Not wanting to come home and crash after every work day.  So, after having to go back to 5 days a week for the past 6 months, I was not happy and could tell that my life was not in balance.  In September, I asked to go back to 4 days a week.  And I was expecting it to take longer for me to feel better.  I'm thankful that it's going so well, and it didn't take that long.  I feel like on my day off, I get to be a domestic diva.  I've been spending a lot of time in the kitchen, especially since it's harvest time and I had to power through all those tomatoes!  I'd still like to make another batch of salsa, but I'm watching my tomatoes to see if they will tell me when it's time.  Or perhaps we'll make another trip down to the farm and I can pick a bunch of new ones.  My mother-in-law has bins and bins of tomatoes!

Anyways, I have slowly started daydreaming more, which is a good sign that my mojo is returning.  And all of a sudden, this week, I was inspired to do something about my girl quilts project.  I started them quite a while ago, and I prepared all the squares during the quilt retreat in February.  As with my boy quilts, which I made 4 of, I wanted to go big or go home.  So, I decided to make enough squares to make 3 baby quilts and one twin.  Hee hee hee.  Somewhere in my calculations, I overshot.  By a LOT.  Haha.  When I laid out all my squares today, I had enough left over to make a 5th quilt, in lap size (5x7 squares).  Whoops!  Oh well!  I guess I have an abundance now!

This week I emailed Christine, who works at the office at my church, and asked her if I could come to church on Friday and use the ample space in the basement, (including 3 fuzzy divider thingys!) to lay out all my girl squares.  

 She said absolutely, so this morning, I quickly finished pressing my last stage of squares, packed them all up, and came to the church basement.  Here are my blank slates.

 I made a quick calculation that the first board would be big enough to fit my twin quilt, which is 6x9 squares.  As you can see, the last two rows are on the floor.

 I told Christine to give me about half an hour to get started, and then she could come down and have a look at what I was doing.  She was kind enough to take some pictures of me in action.  :)

 I laid out the 3rd baby quilt on the table.

 And when I realized I had a very large stack of squares left over, I laid more out on the floor for quilt #5!  This one is lap size, 5x7.

 I don't know why I always have to make my projects so huge!  I used to make 13 pairs of PJ pants for Christmas presents.  I haven't been able to do that for a few years now!  And yet I still have 12 pairs either half made, or cut out, hoping to finish them for another big batch of PJ gifts.  LOL.  Maybe this year, with my day off, I'll actually get to a few of them.

 When I was cutting and assembling squares at the quilt retreat, I knew this was a lot of squares, but I had no idea how excessive it was!  It was a lot of work!  I think I made 160 squares!  I followed the directions for the king size, and then divvied them up into multiple quilts.  

 After counting them today, 100 would have been sufficient.  6x9=54, and the baby ones are 4x5=20.  3 baby quilts and a twin would use 114.  And there's always a handful of extras.  

 I suppose I had to choose between making 100 squares, for queen size, and 160 squares, for king, and I opted for the more the merrier!  Ha ha!  Oh well!  Now that the hard part is done, I can tackle these one at a time.

 I wanted to show you how lovely our church basement is.  We have our quilting bees down here.  There's actually one tomorrow that I will be going to.  It's so light and spacious!

 I'm glad that's all done with!  Now my squares can sit in little organized piles and wait for me to assemble them into quilt tops.  :)

I am optimistic, however, that now that I have my mojo back, I will be sewing more and more often.  The fact that I had the gumption to do this today shows that anything is possible!