The past 2 weeks have been craaaaaazy.  Unexpected life changing events, deadlines at work that stayed the course (so glad for that!), one child took us on a road trip to where the college journey starts in 2 months, and another headed off to camp.

But mostly….well our modem died at home.  Or at least I think it did.  A repair guy came out, did some magic outside and declared it was fixed but said let’s put in a new modem.  Now I can’t get the wireless printer to recognize it which is kind of a big deal for paper piecing.

In the meantime, I was still scrambling trying to decide if I even could pull together a quilt as a wedding gift in less than 30 days.  Months earlier I had bought a metro rings ruler with the idea of a modern wedding ring quilt.  Oh no way could I finish it that quickly.  That was back when I thought I might have a couple of months or more.

Then I had an idea that included paper piecing their last name and the wedding date along with 2 large interlocking rings.  I sketched it all out in EQ7, slept on it and said oh no way can I finish that in a month.  I slept some more.  I remembered that there was another quilt pattern I had in mind, called diamonds in the deep.  Surely this had to be the one.  I bought the pattern and fabric, cut out some strips and an hour into it I realized that it was going to be yards and yards of very accurate sewing because the strips are 1″, 1.25″, 1.5″, 2″…you get the idea.  Maybe that wasn’t such a great idea.  But I could paper piece it!

So I headed back to EQ7.  I sketched out the various blocks.  I printed them out and…because the pattern is on point, each block actually covered 4 pieces of paper! And there were a number of blocks.  Maybe I could straighen it out and print each one on one page.  Nope; the blocks are larger than 8″ so it still wouldn’t fit on ordinary paper.  That would mean a series of accurately taping each block together, taking it to Kinko’s and making multiple copies on larger paper.  And then….

 Our internet went down and I lost a day working on that.  So I’m not doing that quilt either.  But I did get a row from one of the Texas quilt shops for the row-by-row that’s currently running.  I’ve seen some awesome photos of some of the rows but one is plenty for me.  I’m not in a rush to get that done; I just picked it up when I was busy looking for fabric for the quilt that doesn’t want to seem to happen.

In the meantime, I finally decided to replace my very worn out, takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’ several years old FitBit that was being held together by super glue and I used some recognition points at work to get a new Alta for free.  It doesn’t count stairs but I was happy to trade that feature off for a skinny wristband.

Oh and I have been sewing more connectors for the patchwork of the crosses quilt. I think I need at least 23 or so of the little ones that I’ve been making to catch up to the big blocks.  Then I’ll make 7 corner stones and then I’ll finally be ready to move ahead on making more of the actual blocks.  But it’s getting there.  This is a quilt that I can’t imagine anyone ever trying to do on a timeline.

I took a forced break from the Splendid Sampler at least for the last 2 blocks until I can get the printer figure out since they both involve needing a paper template.