Made It Monday: A quilt gone horribly wrong & sourdough starter

Well, you can’t win them all.  I started this “simple” nine-patch quilt quite some time ago, and while the final machine quilting stages have probably botched the whole thing, I can still say that I enjoyed the process.  I have good memories of working on squares while I watched The Great British Sewing Bee on Youtube or listening to Pandora, of figuring out how to piece together the quilt, etc.  But as I tried to machine quilt it, it went from, “I think I can make this work” to a sinking feeling that it was just getting worse as I went along.  When things don’t work out with a project, I have tried to look at what I learned from it, and in this case, it was, “Don’t try to wing it.  Just don’t.  Because things can go horribly wrong.”

I am thankful for several things, one being that it was a crib-sized quilt and not a queen, two that it was not a gift for anyone, three, that I wasn’t something I was planning on wearing anywhere, and four, that it was made with free materials that I already had for the most part.  I really don’t feel like I lost out in the whole thing, more just that I learned from it and learned to cut my losses when it truly wasn’t working out.  I tried to bind the quilt by folding over the backing over the edge, and it was really much trickier than I thought it would be, and then the quilting just didn’t work out – the machine kept on puckering fabric as it stitched, so I need to go back and pay more attention next time to what my sewing machine manual or other books say when it comes to quilting.

Another failure sometime ago was sourdough starter, but I decided to try it again, and now I have a happily-fermenting culture going on above my toaster oven.  This too is from Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Everyday.  I had tried to follow his method in the winter, but because household temperatures were much cooler (we keep it at about 67-68 in the winter), the culture took awhile to get going, and developed mold around the edge of the jar after five days or so.  I have seen quicker fermentation this time around and have been careful to wipe the edges of the bowl where I am mixing, and so far, it seems to be progressing nicely.