Get-Home-itis

When I was in the Navy, I remember a training once on the dangers of Get-Home-itis.  This is the

Neglected: 1) laundry; 2) the dogs

tendency to let your guard down and neglect safety and protocols when you are on your way home.  In fact, the closer you get to your home destination, the more tunnel-vision you tend to get.  This is dangerous in a military situation, because soldiers out on patrol might overlook hostile signs in their eagerness to get back to their home base.

What does this have to do with here-and-now?  Well, I've been in the home stretch of finishing a quilt top, and have perhaps neglected a few things around the house in my eagerness to get done.

Neglected: 3) the garden

One of the things I enjoy about quilting, in the early stages, is the ability to work in small chunks of time.  Just 15 minutes to iron open a few seams, or 20 minutes to trim the next group of pieces to be chain-pieced together.  It's all about the little steps I can take on a daily basis.  I can flit into the sewing room and recharge my batteries, and my family hardly even notices I am gone.

But eventually, I want to see visible progress.  With Sweetie's t-shirt quilt 1/2 done as of August 1st, I was in a virtual race the last 2 weeks of the month to get all the blocks put together.  And I may have suffered a bit of tunnel-vision myself.  (What, tomatoes are not supposed to creep along the ground?  But they look so happy down there intertwined with the squash plant.)  I definitely neglected all the little bits and pieces around the house as I spent many hours holed away in my sewing cave.

Finally got the last block finished at stitch-n-bitch, and I was able to see my baby come to life.

Oh, it's so lovely.  This is my own design, based roughly on a picture I saw in the book Terrific Tees.  I could only imagine how it would actually look with the t-shirts in it, after hand-coloring a log cabin trial pattern in a rainbow scheme.

I already have a backing fabric.  Have to decide whether I intend to quilt this very simply, or send it out to be professionally quilted.  But first... Kennette said that I might need a bit of a border.  Dang, wanted so much for this to be completed.  She's right, of course.  I made each of the log cabin blocks have a solid (or solid-looking) fabric along the outside edges, but there are 3 white t-shirts along the edges also, and that demands a border.

 I auditioned an Alexander Henry rainbow stripe as a possible border.  (This is the fabric Sweetie initially picked out to be the sashing of a much-plainer design with these t-shirts.)  Worried that it might be too "yellow".  Sweetie is not a yellow fan.  I purposefully made sure the quilt--although having an overall rainbow color theme--was largely in the blue spectrum. 

Argh... I could agonize over exactly the right border fabric for ages, or I could just go with the flow here and git 'er done. 

I wanna be done with this one, because the next t-shirt quilt is knocking at my creative side-door.  And the joy of starting a new quilt is really calling to me.