I started the Village Green quilt as a block of the month the first year we were married. I liked the colors. I liked the designed. I liked the buildings particularly since they reminded me of historical buildings where I live. Bethlehem doesn’t have a center green, but when I walk downtown I see row houses, brick Victorians, cottages with flower gardens, Central Moravian Church, the Brethren’s House, similar buildings that are on the quilt.
The patterns offered the option of paper piecing or applique and finished with ribbon embroidery embellishments. I chose to hand applique the blocks and one a month seemed like a reasonable plan. The first three were finished before the next arrived. I’m not sure what happened but then the next thing I knew I had three waiting. After a year I had all the blocks, many still in their packaging. While I knew how to embroider, using ribbon was new to me.
I discovered applique was a great project to take on trips, especially airplane trips with lots of sitting around time, and when scissors were banned I used the cutter on my dental floss. It made for ragged ends I trimmed when I got home from the trip. Eventually, the whole project was put in a box to finish. Somewhere along the line, I lost two of the blocks, most likely leaving them on a plane even after hearing the flight attendants announcement to “check seat pockets for personal belongings.”
Last summer I read about the creative red zone.
Have you ever been near the end of a project and it just seems to languish indefinitely? And no matter how much you work on it, you feel as if you have just as much to do as you did before you started the last push?
5 Ways to Get Through the Creative Red Zone
If so, you’ve been in the red zone of a project. I call it the red zone because it’s similar to the phenomenon we see in (American) football where the offense gets to the last 20 yards before they would have scored a touchdown, only to lose the ball or, at best, have to go for a field goal rather than a touchdown.
As a football I understood the concept and went through my pile of UFO’s to list those that were in the Red Zone. With two blocks I could not find anywhere in the house the math was pretty easy – Village Green was a Red Zone project. My first thoughts to bring this to completion was some kind of redesign. The second thought was eBay and, TaDa!, I found them on eBay. Throughout the summer and fall I finished the missing blocks and one, and after getting the right needle for ribbon embroidery, I finished each block, marking each off as I worked my way through the red zone, finishing the top.
Next up, quilting and binding, along with the other 14 or so tops waiting to be quilted and bound.
Snippets from the Attic 