Citrus Sails Quilt

Front of Citrus Sails Quilt

Back of Citrus Sails Quilt

As part of the do.good.stitches charity bee, I've been quilting the top from my month. This entire project has been somewhat of a nightmare to be honest and I was about ready to throw in the towel on multiple occasions. Nevertheless, I persevered and I learned quite a few lessons along the way.

Lesson 1: Being a perfectionist isn't always perfect.  My design involved many half square triangles and lining up the points gave me a headache. I spent hours sewing and unpicking blocks together in an attempt to get them to line up perfectly. Luckily, my husband intervened. He told me that the Native Americans intentionally put a mistake in any handmade thing they make to show that it is created with human hands and humans are imperfect -- acknowledging that only God is perfect. I thought that was a rather interesting way to look at things. So I decided to embrace my inner imperfections and sew together the blocks to the best of my ability.

The front of the quilt - you can't even tell that some of the points don't line up perfectly!

Lesson 2: Sometimes simple is better. When I went to quilt it, I had a complex plan in my head and ended up with some (okay a lot) of puckers on the back. I couldn't for the life of me quiet the perfectionist side of my brain and I spent the better half of a day unpicking the quilting. Then I redid it in much simpler way and I like it much better.

The quilting - diagonal straight lines.

Lesson 3: Machine binding a quilt isn't the worst thing. I've always been opposed to machine binding (mainly because I couldn't get it to look the way I wanted) and have spent hours hand sewing my bindings. But because I was so behind on the deadline for this quilt, I bit the bullet and bound it by machine. And ya know, it doesn't look half bad.

What lessons have you learned while quilting?