Dancing With The Fan

     This has not been a very productive week--it seems like everytime I have sat down to do anything, some crisis has occurred.  It's been everything from toilet paper hanging from the trees (I teach high school and it's homecoming) to a missing doggie food bowl (that was a serious trauma for the pampered schnauzer). But I finally managed to get in a very small amount of work on an old UFO.  Knowing that for the next month or so, time would be at a premium, I decided to re-think how I chose my UFO to work on.  I decided to go with the not-so-great ones first--I know, that sounds silly.  But I figured I could use them to practice new stitches and kind of mutli-task.  I'd get better at free motion and I'd whittle down the pile.  And, if the stitch I was practicing didn't turn out so great.....well, it wouldn't be at total loss. A grandmother's Fan got the nod this week.
     I started this small Grandmother's Fan patchwork quilt quite a while ago--it's got fabric that used to be maternity tops in it, so it's at least fifteen years old--I think I waited a year  after the baby was born to start cutting up the maternity stuff.  Hey--they had stretched through three kids, they deserved a decent upcycle.

Once again, I was left trying to piece together the past--it's really like a quilt, isn't it?  I look at these UFOs and get glimpses of the person I was then and the life I was in the middle of.  Some of it I can remember vivdly and some of it is nothing more than the merest shadow of a memory.  I don't immediately remember where all the fabric comes from, which bugs me because almost all of these early quilts come from someone's clothing. I had pieced it and begun the quilting on it twice.  Some of it is handwork--which means it was really early in my quilting time.  I think I got frustrated with it; probably it seemed like I wasn't making any progress on it.  Gee, I can't imagine why--it's not like I didn't have three young children at the time!  This quilt also had some really bad machine echo quilting around the outside of the fan sections.

I was ripping out the bad quilting to rework the piece when my youngest, the 16 year-old princess, plopped down in the sewing room--aka my oldest boy's empty bedroom.  She watched for awhile and then started the memory trail.  There were pieces off of some of her old dresses, pieces from my blouses, sashing that was left over from a christmas tree skirt, and some things neither one of us could remember.  That's always been one of my favorite quilting times--that invitation to remember the journey of how all the parts come together.

So even though this little quilt isn't destined to be a show-stopper, I think I'll have to keep this memory.  Once I got the atrocious stitching out, I stitched a flowerbomb over the fans.  It's hard to see with the different pieces, so I flipped over to the back. I used a kind of branched paisley on the background.

The sashing has vining hearts interwoven on it.  I think I'll use pom-poms on the outer edge and finish it with a narrow pieced border.  It's coming along decently, but it's still a WIP.  But that's okay--once again the princess trotted in to 'quilt-chat' and dug through the UFO pile to see what else was there and give her opinion on what should be next. I'm really not caring if I finish or not, just so long as that particular memory piece continues.