Bad Choices

There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.

Proverbs 16:25 NIV

I actually considered a few different names for this quilt. One was Fabric Vomit because it's so busy that you can barely discern a pattern. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, kind of like the dog ate some fabric and then vomited up this quilt. Except that I don't have a dog. I also thought of Anything But Subtle, because this quilt kind of shouts. Another name I came  up with was That Wasn't a Good Idea. And it wasn't. It really wasn't, but I ended up calling it Bad Choices because I made more than one bad choice in the making of this quilt. Let me tell you its story. 
I wanted to make a quilt for someone and was trying to come up with an idea that would be relatively quick and use fabric from my stash. A lot of my 1 yard/metre collection was either boring or not quite what I wanted. So, I was rummaging around in my stash to see what else I could come up with. 

I found some leftovers from Chelsea Rose Pop, and there seemed to be enough of these two that I might be able to make a 3-yard quilt work, if I could only find more fabric from the same line for the third fabric. Or maybe an alternate fabric that would coordinate well. Unfortunately, the only other fabrics I found from this line were just small scraps - not enough to work in a 3-yard quilt. And I didn't want a really loud 3rd fabric. 
My first bad choice was not learning from Chelsea Rose Pop. I never really liked that quilt because it was too busy with these fabrics and difficult to discern the pattern of the blocks. 

My nephew Peter gave me this book for my birthday. As I flipped through the pages, I found a few projects that I wanted to try, one of which was the Shadowed Square Lap Quilt. The Shadowed Square is a quilt block consisting of a half square triangle of the focus fabric on one half and the other half is varied piecing. In this project, there are 6 variations. 
Since I couldn't find a good coordinating fabric to make a 3-yard quilt with the Chelsea Rose fabric, I opted to make the Shadowed Square quilt as a scrappy quilt. After all, I really loved Weather Alert and so I thought that the scrappy look would work great here as well. However, my second bad choice was deciding to use the Chelsea Rose fabric as the focus fabric. There's just too much going on in this quilt top to use this large and bold print, and the half square triangles really aren't big enough to feature this fabric adequately. It's a very pretty fabric, and would have been great in a not-so-busy pattern with more subtle complementary fabrics. But my third bad choice was to use fabrics that I thought would coordinate with the colours in the focus fabric, and it was just too much. 
My final foolhardy decision was to use a small fleece throw that I had as the backing.

It was just taking up space that a quilt could take up and I figured why not use it as a quilt backing. Unfortunately, since it was just a cheap little blanket, it stretched A LOT! When I first compared it to the quilt top, I knew that it would be a tight squeeze. It was maybe 2-3 inches wider than the quilt and 4-5 inches longer. But I figured I could make it work. I used pins to attach it to the leaders and wasn't planning on using the clamps on the sides. But it was droopy on the sides, so I tightened up the quilt by rolling the pole. But I still found that I had to use the side clamps, which made it very difficult to quilt because I had to keep repositioning them to keep them out of the way of the machine when I was quilting close to the edges. And as I advanced the quilt, the backing stretched lengthwise, which pulled the sides in. I had to keep pulling on the sides of the backing to make sure it covered the whole quilt top. And I ended up trimming off about 10 inches off the bottom when I was finished quilting, plus 1-2 inches off the top. As I said, it stretched a lot, and the backing is a lot thinner than it would have been had it not been so stretched out. And the quilt top ended up rather pucker-y, especially along the left side. But the puckers seemed to mostly work themselves out with the binding, and it just looks extra puffy in some areas. But I did notice that it tends to curl back on the bottom when I hung it up to take the picture, thanks again to the over-stretching. Perhaps I should wash it in hot water and the shrinkage in the cotton quilt top would make up for it... 
The quilting design I chose is Sweetpea Scramble. It's quite a pretty design and I'm hoping I won't hold a "grudge" against it because of all the challenges I had quilting this quilt. It's one of the Golden Thread designs that is now sold by Handi Quilter. 

Hmm, I do have more fleece throws, but will I use them as quilt backing? If I decide to try it, I will check out the throw first to see if there is more stretch in one direction, and put that direction horizonally on the frame. Secondly, I will likely use regular quilt batting, instead of polyester fibrefil, as the quilt top is easier to manage with regular batting. I will also have to be more careful to ensure both backing and top are aligned, as my top in this quilt seemed to be migrating to the left, which is part of the reason for more puckers on that side and I had more problems with the backing disappearing on the left. And finally, I would make sure that the size of the quilt top is more appropriate to the size of the throw. 
I had already decided that I was not going to burden anyone with this quilt when I put the blocks on the design wall. But I decided to put it together anyway because what else was I going to do with those odd blocks? So, now that it's finished, it's going to remain in my own collection. And it's kind of grown on me. Even though, it is quite loud and busy, the fabrics and colours are quite pretty.  And I actually like it better than Chelsea Rose Pop, although it will definitely never be my favourite quilt.  
Now for an object lesson. Sometimes we can make important life decisions - ones that are far more consequential than fabrics in a quilt -  that seem right at the time. Or fit our agenda. Or make us "happy". But, as the Bible verse at the beginning of this post says, those decisions can not only get us into trouble, but sometimes the results are permanent, sometimes very obvious and ultimately sometimes can result in death. Ours or someone else's. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. And that's a pretty serious consequence for a "bad choice". I want to align my decisions with the Word of God, the Bible, and avoid those serious consequences of misguided choices.