The Three Misfits

An appropriate subtitle might read "She thought she could but she was wrong!"  The story begins a year or maybe it's two years now, anyway quite a while ago when I read one of Bonnie Hunter's posts about her delectable mountains quilt and her free pattern for same.  It looked easy enough, and I proceeded to cut a huge pile of squares in hopes of making some sort of "purple mountain majesties" quilt of my own.  Long story short, try as I might, I kept messing up on the final cut to complete the blocks, and my mountain majesties were quickly turning into a one-way spiky trek up the same l-o-n-g mountain.  Only a few blocks turned out right, and they will show up eventually in the photos below.  So, what to do with all the uncut large HST's still sitting there?  Arrowhead blocks maybe?  Made two of those but didn't care for them, so the final option became hourglass blocks.  By this time I was thoroughly tired of messing with them, hated looking at the fabrics, gave away all but a couple of the purple HST squares to a visitor at one of our quilt ministry meetings, and threw the remainder together into three small wheelchair lap quilts for one of our local nursing homes.  Thus, the finale:

These quilts are smaller than they appear in the photo, the largest is about 40x40 inches, the smallest one around 34 inches square.

The backs:

Some closer shots:

The center panel of this last one is a piece of fabric from our ministry stash that has a coated shiny, almost crinkly texture.  Pretty, but it created havoc with the machine tension on the back of the free motion quilting.  There are a few little messes of dark thread on the reverse behind the panel, but with the coated shiny texture I was leery of unstitching and redoing because it seems certain that the original needle holes were going to remain.  Too bad, because it was overall the nicest of the three quilts.

So, there endeth my long sad saga with The Three Misfits.  You gotta show the bad along with the good, right?  

The past couple days have been spent slowly cutting lots of tiny pieces for the next four blocks of my Diamond Jubilee quilt.  I'm making a version of the Sunflower Quilt shown in Betsy Chutchian and Carol Staehle's book 19th-Century Patchwork Divas' Treasury of Quilts.  Hoping to have all four blocks completed by the end of the month.  I really want to devote much of my time now to making this quilt, so I may end up linking the three little quilts above as my mini(s) for the month with Wendy at The Constant Quilter when she posts her mini at the end of this month.

The trees are beginning to color up on the higher hillsides, and we had our first real frost night before last.  Autumn will be in full glory very soon.  Our skies are hazy with the smoke from the western wildfires and we just heard that remnants of the smoke plume have reached Europe.  The sunrise today was an exceptionally bright orange in contrast to the beige-grayish sky.  Eerily beautiful, but the knowledge of the destruction left in the wake of the fires is so very sad.  Our prayers go out to all those who are enduring the terrible air quality conditions as well as those potentially in the path of the wildfires.