Seam Ripper Sunday

After weeks of no sewing, today was THE day to get back into it.
I decided to start with the backing for the HST quilt, which needs a name but I think it's destined to be the HST quilt. Or that F^@#!^% quilt.
I had already made one strip with the left over HST's and decided to make two more for the backing.  Three strips of HST's later and some 2 1/2 inch sashing sewn between them, I put it on the floor to bask in the glory of my fabulous sewing. WTF, I had taken six straight strips of fabric and sewn them into a very curved piece that would have probably worked really well on a lampshade. Unfortunately no photos because I was so annoyed, I picked it up straight away and pulled out the seam ripper.
It looks like this now.

Not too bad but that was a total waste of an hour of my time. After that little setback it was time to try something else.

I shouldn't have bothered.

I want to make a quilt for some friends. The colours they like are grey/browns and orange. I used some Design Seed colour swatches as inspiration. I thought this would help because these are really not my go to colours.  This one below was one of the colour swatches I used.

Design Seeds

For the design I decided on another raw edge circle quilt as I really enjoyed making the last one.

I raided my stash and found some fabrics. I wanted to try popping a few batiks in there as I quite like the odd batik in amongst other fabrics. 

These are the background fabrics I chose. I liked the batiks but didn't like many of the other prints. The lighter browns are especially blech, way too light and shouldn't be in there at all. One teeny tiny problem I don't have enough fabric in the good colours to make the quilt and I really don't want to buy any more in these colours. 

Added in lots of oranges and then added the creams to help with more contrast for the foreground. By this stage I was thinking, either I'm a genius and this is going to be so freaking good, or I've totally lost my mind and I'm going to make the world's ugliest quilt. 

Time to make a test block. I could have picked all the nicest fabrics to make the first block to see how nice it could be or I could have picked the worst fabrics to see how bad it could be.  Which did I choose?  A sensible person would have said let's see how nice it could look. 

I'm not sensible. 

I really dislike it.

This was after I had measured to make sure one of the circles was dead centre of the square, sewed it up, took one look at it and pulled out the seam ripper again and promptly pulled it apart. Sorry no photos of my disasters. I really need to be more prepared with my camera to prove that I'm really crap at sewing sometimes a lot of the time. 

I wonder whether they would like a nice pink and aqua quilt instead.

That was my day, my sewing mojo returned but was missing some vital parts, common sense and accuracy.  I'm hoping they will turn up soon.

The only bright part of my day was that I wasn't the only one with a seam ripper as a constant companion.  Shay and I complained all day by email about our disastrous sewing attempts! It was nice to be able to swear (a lot) and know that Shay knew exactly how I felt.  I think we may have broken our own unofficial swear count today. We may have also invented some extra words too. It's amazing what spell checker will let through! Auto correct is not my best friend either, at one point, apparently I called her something very rude and very politically incorrect when I didn't check my email before I sent it. Fortunately, Shay is still talking to me. At least I think she is, hmm, I haven't heard from her in the last couple of hours!