Thursday, March 30, 2017

The best laid plans...


...often go awry.

I've been making a bajillion quilts lately. It hasn't been quite that many, but it feels like it. I'm trying to finish as many as I can before Spring announces itself fully, and I'm conscripted into yard work for a number of months. Today I pieced together the 12th of 40 lap quilts that I'm making for family for Christmas 2017. It's for one of our little ones -- a two-year-old granddaughter. She's adorable...


Well, unfortunately this quilt top didn't go as well as I'd hoped. First of all I bought this Cosmo Forest Delight fabric...


...which I really liked. It's cute, right? How can you go wrong with bears and flowers? I'll tell you. It was nearly impossible to find coordinating fabrics. I have quite an extensive fabric stash at my home, but nothing complimented these cute bears. I ended up having to go to a quilt shop near my home, and two employees and I had to scoured every shelf to find three somewhat coordinating fabrics. Unfortunately, the fabrics we found weren't really within the color scheme I wanted for the quilt. Here's the quilt top with the pink, turquoise and puke green fabric I chose...



{Sigh.} I was really hoping to stay with pinks and reds since it's for a little girl, but both the pink and red in the Cosmo fabric is a very unusual shade. Ugh. I'm a little disappointed. I'm just not sold on that green fabric.

You'd think all that would be bad enough, but there's more. I should have chosen the same turquoise color or the pink oblong fabric for the back of the quilt, but I decided to pick something totally different to add some "fun." {Geesh.} I chose the fabric below. I thought it was a cute pattern with a lot of the same colors as the front of the quilt. It looked colorful and playful to me.
 

When I got home I noticed something odd about the fabric, so went to the computer and looked up its name. It's called Tula Pink Tabby Road Cat Eyes. You guessed it. When you turn the fabric, it looks like this...

 
That's right. It's a million cat eyes staring at you. What two-year-old is going to want to wrap themselves in creepy cat eyes? {Shudder.} Emery is bound to have nightmares for years, and it will be this granny's fault. Honestly, I think I need to take a little break from quilting and plant some pansies.

I'm really hoping that I'll like this quilt a whole lot better when it gets back from the longarm quilter, and I've distanced myself from it for a couple of weeks. {Doubt it.} BTW, the backing of the quilt is positioned so the "cat eyes" are less apparent. I hope.