So Much Fun to Finish up a Forever Project!

Well, all good things must come to an end. The HST Medallion quilt is completely finished up! All 102 inches! One of those projects started sort of by impulse, but not really. I'd looked and looked and LOOKED at a picture of an antique quilt, wistfully thinking about how cool it would be to own one.

HST Medallion is done!!!!

Then one day, it just happened. I found myself putting together the centerpiece of a four year long project! It happened in fits and starts of course. Things this complicated always do around here. 

A lot going on with this one...

How in the world could I possibly make myself work on one quilt and one quilt only? Yeah. Not happening. I folded HST Medallion in half and laid it where I normally take the quilty pictures. Just so you could see the scope of how large this one is. She's a big 'ol beauty! When I moved the table out of the way {with the help of one of my daughters}, and tried to take a picture of the entire thing? It was basically a fail. It really needs to be hung up on a line and a pic. taken from a good distance. The light wasn't very friendly in that area of the room either. C'est la vie.

Trying to get a picture of the full quilt

I'd say that I don't know what possessed me to make this particular quilt, but that wouldn't be true. For some rather peculiar reason, I'm happiest when there is one forever type quilt project lurking about in the quilt room, be it all piecing, or all applique, or even a mix of the two. Call me crazy. It's almost definitely gonna be happening again some day!

All hand quilted

For one thing, I don't like feeling inadequate or incapable of making any sort of quilt that I put my mind to. Even terribly difficult quilts can be accomplished one little baby step at a time! Another thing that has occurred to me is that I might possibly relish? having an {almost} impossible task so that everything else seems quite doable by comparison. So silly, but it works.

The lighter blue hsts are facing the opposite
direction, on purpose....

You'd be amazed at how much I've accomplished through the years avoiding these super challenging quilts of mine! Or maybe you wouldn't. I've been pretty transparent about my love/hate relationship with the taking-forever, entirely too tedious, horribly intimidating quilt projects that crop up every four or five years.

My favorite view of a quilt

This quilt wasn't the most complex in the world, but it does have an awful lot of half square triangles in it. And precision sewing is not exactly my forte! If you look closely, there's just a little tiny bit of wave happening on the outside border in a couple places.*sigh  I haven't washed the quilt either, like I love to do. Though I love the crinkly look, I'm terrified some of the blue fabric might have a bleeding issue. Once it's washed up some day in the future, I'm pretty sure that slight waving issue will be less obvious, but for now we're all good. Totally content to wait!

Three impossible tasks that somehow 
made it to a finish!

Not that I'm ashamed of the issue at all. This quilt is way beyond what I ever hoped to accomplish back in my early days of quilting! If you'd have told me 20 years ago that I'd be making any one of the three stacked quilts {in the previous photo}? I'd have laughed in total disbelief!

For a quick trip down memory lane, I pulled the two other {very labor intensive} quilts that seemed to take forever and a day. I mean, there are lots of time consuming quilts around here, but these are the grand poobah's of sheer grit and determination getting me through! All three quilts are ones that I most definitely despaired over at different times and had to really push myself to get in another hour or two of work done here and there. Just to say that I hadn't given up on them! And I've got a sneaky suspicion that Melon Patch might be trying to join the list. But that's a story for another day.

You can read about the Pickle Dish quilt here and Worry Baskets here. All three quilts take me right back to a certain day years and years ago in a small town grocery store, impulsively buying a quilt magazine. I was completely mesmerized by a specific quilt in it, though I didn't have a single clue how to get started on making my own. And no, I never did make that particular quilt! It took a lot of years, many ups and downs, trial and error, learning, learning, learning, but now? I darn well will make whatever quilt I put my mind to. And you can guarantee, they'll be a whole lot better than anything pictured in that long ago quilt magazine....