School is canceled...

I don't know about all this "polar vortex"stuff but it's pretty darn cold outside. So cold they canceled school and delayed twice The thermometer at my friend's house either wasn't working, or legitimately read - 30F [it was pretty windy...] So cold the cat has taken sleeping under the blankets. That little lump right there? That's her. I poked it and it made a cat noise, so I'm leaving well enough alone. Nanook of the North? That would be me. Venturing out of the house. I look like the invisible woman, I know, except for that patch of skin under my sunglasses that was miraculously not frostbitten after my jaunt. Uhm... It was not intentional that my outerwear match my bedding... Saying. 

Anyway. Since school was canceled from the cold some jobs that I had prescheduled ended up getting shuffled around or canceled. Because they don't need you if the day they were trying to write curriculum got bumped because of extreme weather conditions. I'm only slightly confused by the whole thing; I don't exactly understand but anyway I'm home. Not out driving in the cold.

I've been getting some sewing time in. Except that this project is making me crazy. When they said challenging, they weren't kidding. I keep flipping the squares around and putting them in the wrong place. Took me a week and a half (and by that I mean 4 episodes of NCIS / a free week night plus some time on the weekends) to piece the center strip. I have two more seams to sew and it's finally finished. FINALLY. Ready to rip my hair out.

It's a project from the Jan/Feb 2014 issue of Fons and Porter's Love of Quilting, and while I love quilting and sewing, this project was very aptly named. Star Crossed. Things that you think, that would be great together, but like Romeo and Juliet, it just ends badly because something, somewhere, is working against it.

This section in particular with the horizontal grey stripe - which you can't see because it fades out in the picture. I did follow the directions. No matter how I turned my triangles, half of that sucker would not make a thing that looked like that. One evening, down the drain trying to figure out what the heck. Also realizing that I'd done it in the wrong fabric, so I had to do it over again in the right fabric a different night. Only to discover I'd done it wrong with the right fabric. Again.  Another night shot ebcause I couldn't get the lay out straight, even with the picture in front of me, and sewed several things together wrong.

Really struggling with these fabric choices. I realize it's still in the working stages, and the photograph isn't the best.The creme is basically the same thing as the aqua, it's just a cream back ground, not aqua. Then there's that stripe of chopped up stripyness that's supposed to be off center... this whole thing is a giant star cluster of holy crap what just happened, and why did it happen, and it was supposed to be really great and pretty but no. Also, why do we call it a twin? A double? Who thought that was a good idea?

Because I don't need another twin size quilt, I'm making it to fit a double, and I'm doing so by turning this star-crossed project on it's head. Or side... So the tossed salad stripe will be across the top-ish [or bottom, depending on how it's oriented] and the creme stripe will be still be off center. The good news is assembling the tossed salad stripe is the hard part. When this is done, I hope I don't have a huge case of project regretsy.