Back in May, when Brit first emailed to ask if I’d be interesting in doing a running-themed round robin, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into. Somehow we each managed to creating a starting block (pun absolutely intended) and mailed it off Mia.
Each month the mailman would deliver another package that I would open up with both excitement and fear — because there is no telling what sort of masterpiece will arrive. I would then have one month to hopefully add to the blocks specialness and mail it off at the end of the month.
I struggled with Brit’s block because I know and love her and really didn’t want to ruin her creation. Keeping in mind that whatever I added would be buried deep beneath everyone else’s addition, I decided to keep it simple. In retrospect, it was TOO simple. All I could think of was that I didn’t ruin it.
Then Lady J’s quilt arrived. Other than Brit mentioning her a few times in her blog, I know nothing about Lady J. I stared at here quilt nearly all month trying to figure out what to do with it. Brit had embroidered flowers that were running in the top right corner and I wanted to finish off the square by embroidering something in the bottom left. But I could NOT figure out what to embroider. No sooner than when I got an idea, would I shoot it down with reasons why I that idea would not work. I thought of doing a finish line theme…but didn’t know if Lady J actually raced. Over and over this occurred until it was nearly the end of July. That was when I realized that I didn’t even have enough of the purple fabric to finish off the bottom in the same fashion as Brit had done the top. Finally, I came up with this.
The grand finale was Mia’s block. I’d seen pictures of it posted here and there but you really have to hold this quilt in your hands to appreciate it’s creativity. The story that accompanied the quilt brought it all together all the more. The evolution of this particular block as it moved through the round robin was remarkable.
More than anything, I wanted my addition to bring the focus back to the original piece because Mia put so much of her story into this block that I felt it was important to highlight just that. I cut the fabric samples that Mia started with (the ones that symbolize her journey) into squares and created a simple log cabin design to run along the outside border. There was only one problem: the accent fabric was running low. If I kept to my original design, I would run out before adding to each square. Even after I settled on strips half the size of my original intention I realized that I would not have enough to finish out all of the squares. I also would have to use less squares.
Well, the less-squares idea did NOT come together nicely. It didn’t come together at all. As it turned out, I needed ALL the squares to finish off it off properly. Unless I found a way, this would be likened to running 13 miles but not the final 0.1 mile. I was not about to earn a DNF on this project.
I grabbed the remaining scraps of fabric and carefully sewed the pieces together. There was a lot of breath holding going on. Prayers too.