Wunder-Mar

This is finally ready to go to the FFO (Finally Finished Object) pile. The first photo is my starting center block of an Asymmetrcial Round Robin our guild did 6 years ago with another guild out-of-state. The second photo is the finished quilt top.

There was a major roadblock to finishing this quilt - one of the other guild's quilters did a lousy job on her blocks, that's the only way you can put it. The tacit agreement for the round robin was that beginner quilters would sit this out. All along two sides in one part, more than half of Lousy Sewer's spool blocks had no seam allowance on the outer edge; in another round, there was no seam allowance on the outer edges of most of her border's pieced blocks. Two rounds later, a fellow member of Lousy Sewer's guild attached her border onto Lousy Sewer's border leaving gaps where there was no fabric to sew on. (C'mon, now. REALLY?!?!?) Lousy Sewer's own starting center block did not have any two sides whose measurements were identical (11-3/4", 12, 12-1/2", 12-1/4") and I ended up making a new one from identical fabrics from my stash just so the round robin could proceed; there was no way I'd pass on the problem to the others for the next 7 rounds.

So, between bouts of annoyance and resentful disappointment, it's taken me a good long while to figure out how to fix the unfixable to finish the project. I will not sew when I'm in a bad mood, and it just took a lot to get into a "good space" with the quilt top - it was supposed to a fun round robin, you know? The only solution was to take the darn thing apart and fuse narrow strips of fabric to create a seam allowance where it was needed and stitch it back together.

You'll notice a lot of fusible applique. The last step of the round robin was to "add something - your choice" and a member of the other guild affixed fusible webbing to the back of a novelty fabric and went to town clipping and fusing. It's a wall hanging, so there's no real reason to satin stitch around the fused appliques. To say it's cluttered is leaving out a lot, but the appliques and their colors are evenly distributed and precisely trimmed. And, truth be told, sometimes my sewing room is a cluttered. Okay, it's cluttered a LOT of the time ... It's a fun border.

I need to put this project after all the frustrating repair work, but will be thinking on how to finish this - another border? what color binding? The experience did not sour me to round robins, but it sure soured me with the other guild who did not, in my opinion, properly monitor the quality of the work being submitted as per "proper construction" guidelines.