Working on the Patchwork Prism QAL

Tzatziki stalks my quilt

 I have three cats.  That means if I leave the room for five minutes and there's fabric on the ground, when I come back everything has been mysteriously rearranged on the hardwood floor during a game of slip and slide.  After a few days of this I finally moved the furniture off my living room rug and put my triangles there which helped some.  I weighted the quilt pieces down with plates, jars, boxes, ANYTHING to keep things where they were, and the little buggers still moved anything that wasn’t nailed down.

Ponzu stalks my quilt

 That might explain why I actually didn’t make sure everything was in place before I started sewing things together.  I didn't really even get a look at it in it’s entirety so I could tell just how it was going to end up. In fact all I saw when I looked at the floor was that fact that I better hurry up and start putting things together if I wanted to have anything to eat dinner off of this week.  I tried taking pictures of sections so if things got scattered around I’d be able to figure out how to put it together.  When I was sure of an area I’d sew anywhere from 3-6 pieces together so they wouldn’t get shuffled around anymore.

Wasabi knows better than to stalk while I'm in the room

Then tragedy struck – last night I was sewing it together a row at a time, when I realized I’d just sewn a row on upside down.  You’d think this wouldn’t happen but I made my quilt 16 triangles wide instead of 15, so instead of both end triangles pointing the same way, one end points up and the other points down. That means with my wonderful color blending skills (COUGH) the problem wasn't quickly apparent.  Unlike in the actual patchwork prism pattern, an upside down row in my quilt still lines up with the other rows.  With my currently cramped sewing area, I can’t even stretch the quilt out while I'm working on it so it's harder to catch problems as they happen.  I mean…I’d have enough room if I wasn’t working on a few other projects, and trying to leave my cutting table free to errr…cut the triangles to fill in the blank spots in the last two rows… Nevertheless I will say that carrying pieces in from the living room into my sewing room has caused more than one error in transit that I've had to fix along the way.

So after a lot of gentle loving seam ripping I get that fixed. I’m working on the 8^th row, which already had one segment of 3 and one segment of 5 joined together from earlier in the week.  I finish up adding the other triangles in and take it out to the living room to make sure it’s lined up with the rest before I sew it to the rest and…it isn’t.  I turn the lights up to their brightest and give it a good look.  I realize I’ve totally botched something up along the way.  The pink blocks of the finished part are at the edge, and on the new strip they're a few in.  There must be an extra piece on one end because just both end triangles face the WRONG way so it doesn't line up correctly.  Colorwise I can't see how any of it would match up at all,  either with the finished part or the two rows that I have yet to put together.  I see I've made at least one other fatal mistake in the process, there are two pieces of a cat print I know are supposed to be facing the same way, and the one on the forth row is upside down.  FOURTH ROW!  How did I not catch that until row 8?  Worst of all, I have no idea just where I went wrong, or if more than one row has turned around, because I did not take a final set of photos before I got to work.

Well, I’d only had 5 hours of sleep the night before, and at this point it was after midnight.  I probably should have stopped a few hours earlier but I'm stubborn.  I managed to get a grip & step away from the quilt before I made it any worse.  Theoretically I should take today to relax and enjoy the weather as it looks like it’s going to be lovely.  Alas, after common sense forced me to stop working on the patchwork prism last night, I started piecing together a floor mat for the kitchen.  That means as soon as I finish this giant mug of coffee I’m going to get back to work on that, as I think I need to finish a small project and enjoy some success before I try to delve back into this quilt.

Frustrations aside, I'm actually surprisingly pleased with how it's turning out ;)