Labours of love...

The next time I start suggesting I add thin sashing to quilt blocks when I'm assembling them to make a quilt top, somebody tie me up and subject me to waterboarding or similar to make me mend my ways.

Sashing, for the initiated, is a term referring to bands of material you sew around the outside edges of quilt blocks when you have enough of the latter for whatever project happens to be the topic of the moment. They are usually all in the same fabric and thus both 'frame' the blocks and can also give a bit of unity to the design as a whole. As I'm sure my clever readership can work out, the narrower the bands, the more fiddly the work involved...

... a fact I should have remembered earlier on today, when I decided to add some narrow cream sashing to the 140 blocks which will eventually make the latest Chateau Angevin quilt. Narrow = 1 inch finished width in this case.

I started to question my sanity when I'd cut out what seemed like a billion 1.5 inch strips. I continued to do so as I chopped the said billion strips up a bit more so they were the same size length as my quilt blocks. But what really did push me over into teeth-gritting rage was the issue of pressing the seams ... ironing is not my fave task at the best of times and the sheer tedium of grappling with narrow bands of fabric which ALL seemed to want to go the opposite way to the way they should was enough to make me wonder whether it would be less annoying to just unpick the whole lot now and think of some other way to put the things together rather than persevere with this mad plan.

Unfortunately I am made of equal parts lunacy and stubbornness.... and truth be told what I have done so far looks really nice and really sets off the lovely fabric (Fig and Plum by Fig Tree Quilts for Moda) so it looks as if we could be in for several more days of grumpiness until I get this job done.

Somebody, somewhere send me a magnum of Aloxe Corton. Premier Cru if you are feeling generous (or guilty)....