It is the summer of 2004. My best friend is pregnant with her first baby and I am newly engaged. I gave the first draft of my thesis to my advisor for review. My thesis advisor says he won’t read the draft because I was getting married, because I would go off and have babies and quilt paleontology. I was spinning my wheels. Anyone who has done a larger all consuming multi year project knows when you do something like turn in a draft and have to wait, you have no idea what to do with you self. I was lost. So I picked up sewing. There was a baby to make a quilt for. I had never quilted before in my life. I could sew. There was the starting of the internet quilting community. I read enough to make the worlds most hideous baby quilt. I was squares of different textures of fabrics sewn together and then stitch in the ditch quilted to a piece of fleece. I am pretty sure this quilt is no longer in existence. I have no photos of it cause it was pretty bad.
I then had two grand ideas. The first was to sew my wedding dress and the second was to make a king sized wedding quilt. I sewed the muslin for my wedding dress. It fit. It was going to work. I found batiks you could buy online for a good price. I found a foundation paper pieced pattern on quilters cache. I had no idea what paper piecing was and didn't read the directions so I started trying to do this quilt as traditionally pieced quilt. It involved 1/16th measurements and I wasn't the best at cutting. It took four units to make up one block. I ended up making 4 blocks.
I had loads of construction problems and the blocks wouldn't lay quilt flat. And I wasn't squaring my blocks up properly. This quilt also suffered from one other big mistake. there is not contrast. the colors all blend into each other. They look different enough when you hold the yardage next to each other. Other than that one pale green, the other 3 are indistinguishable from each other in color and value.
I got frustrated with this quilt after making 4 block. I needed 36 to make it big enough for the bed. My advisor sat on my thesis for 4 months, at which point I had bullied him enough to read it or I would take it to the department head and the dean. I went back to writing, writing, writing. I set the quilt aside, and I ended up hiring a seamstress to finish my wedding dress and the bridesmaid dresses. I ended up leaving paleontology because I found a job doing hydrology. I was also disillusioned with paleontology after the whole thing.
This quilt is still in my sewing closet 15 years later. I will probably re-purpose the greens at some point and make what I have into a pillow top or a small doll quilt, but as it is, it will never be a full quilt. There are too many technical problems with it. It was a go big or go home kinda idea and at that time I didn't have the knowledge to go big so I went home.
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