After I'd finished Courthouse Steps, I took a bit of time off from quilting. It was summer, the weather was lovely, I didn't want to be indoors much, and I was having some health issues which required that I leave my job for a period of months, and either stay in bed or sit in a chair with lots of cushions in our back yard.

However, I did want to get involved in quilting again, so I started a Round Robin quilting group on a website I'm part of. I thought it would be a good learning process for me and that it wasn't a big commitment (one border every six weeks) which seemed about right for me at the time.

I wanted to do something fun for my centre block which was to be 12 inches, and looking around for inspiration, I found it in a flower I'd taken a picture of while on vacation in South Carolina last spring.



I have no idea what that lovely was called, I found it on one of the many golf courses we visited on Pawley's Island. But after mucking about with my Quilting Wizard software, I came up wit a block that looked this:



But, a funny thing happened on the way to the Forum.

See, I couldn't get those little tiny nine patch squares to be even. No matter what I did, no matter how carefully I sewed a perfect 1/4 inch seam, the squares were NEVER. EVEN. In addition, the triangles didn’t come out the correct size and one half of the pieced units had the fabric sitting the wrong way. Flipping it around only meant that the fabric was now sitting the wrong way, the other way. Chain piecing is a great, fast way to make perfectly squared triangles. But NOT triangles made out of rectangles! (Or so I learned. ) In my efforts to produce one "perfect" block, I ended up making several blocks. After making several blocks, I thought I might as well make a bunch more, and ended up with a twin sized quilt.



The fabric came from my stash - mostly Kaffe Fassett, and from the period when I was wildly buying fabric for future quilts without a thought in my head about what I was making, so I ran out of fabric, thus inspiring my first (simply) pieced border. Which was rather ironic, since the whole point of making the block was to have other people make borders for it.



I ended up calling the (extremely BRIGHT) finished product "Spider's Kiss" because the block pattern looked a bit like one I'd seen displayed at a quilt show that was called "Spider Block". A sad, unevenly pieced homage, if you will.

I did eventually figure out that the problem with those nine patches was not my 1/4 inch seam, but the fact that in cutting too many layers of fabric at once, the lower strips were uneven. And also, that adjusting one piece of the pattern's size throws off the whole block. Who knew? *laughs and blushes*

Live and learn!

It's currently one of my many UFOs; since it wasn't made in colours or a size I would use in my house, I just moved on to the next thing, but now that I've promised myself to finish my UFOs before beginning something new, I'll be quilting it very soon!

That one, and others, I say firmly. :)