As is often the case, Sue was way ahead of me on this one...at retreat when she had all her cutting and assembling of four patches done and laid out on the design wall, I came close to saying...NOPE! this one is not for me; as much as I love it, it is just too fiddly for me. I reminded myself tho, that the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time, and I really loved this "elephant" so I took the first bite and then I was off and running. As Sue worked away on her's and I got to see it all assembled, it made me more hungry to get mine done.
I kept thinking about something Carrie had said in her comments on the pattern...
and I quote..." The name comes from my Clover seam ripper...I wore one out while making this quilt."
If someone as accomplished as Carrie wore her ripper out, it was not looking good for me!
I did get all the cutting done at retreat, (all 685 pieces of them!) and I also managed all the piecing of the four patches, so that when I got home, all I would have to do is line up the rows on my design wall and sew them together....all 685 pieces of them!
I put it off for a week or so and last Saturday I decided I best get at it...I must say having a design wall was extremely helpful! After placing all the blocks in rows, I started sewing...
I was almost half way through piecing and I was thinking about the finished project, and photos and a blog post and then it occurred to me that I had not yet used my Clover ripper...an ever so slight grin crossed my face and I decided that I would title ths blog post, "Clover-less". I started to format what I was going to say, and moving right along, ...you guessed it! I couldn't quite match my seams on a row...it didn't take me long to find the problem. It wasn't a sewing, or assembly problem...but a cutting problem. Somehow I had cut a few of the printed squares at 2" instead of 2 1/4".
I had absolutely no extra fabric left to recut these pieces. ENTER THE CLOVER RIPPER!
The only way to fix things was to take apart a couple seams and make 1/8" seams on each side to compensate for the missing 1/4".
If not for that little cutting error, my project would have been Clover-less, but that's what I get for being over confident...hence the title of this blog post.
Well, I have done a ton of talking, so now it is time to show you the fruits of our labour.
Sue made her Clover with a variety of Civil War repros left from her almost completed Dear Jane Quilt.
I absolutely love her choice of fabrics!
With several other projects on the go, as well as working a forty hour week, Sue has not had time to get hers quilted yet, but I know it will be a beauty when she gets it done.
I on the other hand have nothing but time on my hands, and live such a slack and low key existance that I had all kinds of time to quilt mine <grin> I am kidding, but I have to fly out to Ont. for a week at the end of the month and I just knew that if I didn't get it done right away, it would get set aside and neglected. I really felt that it deserved to be and quilted but for me it became a "now or never" issue, and I chose to machine quilt it now.
I used charm squares by Barbara Brackman called Metropolitan Fair.
I absolutely love the finished project, and I find I am being drawn more and more to these Civil War era repros.
She is a right pretty thing. Oh! Did I mention there are 685 pieces in her, and she is only 34" square!
Thank you Carrie for not making this a Queen sized Schnibble!
