My First Six Quilts, uhum-sorta

If this was a job, I'dav been fired already. But since what interests me most are shots in the dark, One out of six successes is good enough to keep me playing. Quilting books aren't hard to find. I checked 5 out of the public library. My first failure was inspired by an article in "Quilts A to Z" by Linda Causee (page 30), on traditional  red-work quilts. Sewing with Nancy's "Create A Simple Potholder In 30 Minutes" (hah!) was a good source for info on potholder essentials. Even though I dreaded the bias tape finishing touch, I followed Nancy's lead and got some cotton batting and a yard of Insul~Bright (I didn't need that much). It was maybe not the best time to try mastering a new craft. I wanted to make a wedding present for my niece Candice. I had a sewing machine, and a little more than a week.

My first effort, a red-work experiment, seemed simple enough. Starting with my slightly straightened thumbnail as a pattern, I stacked my mid-weight, cream colored, cotton canvas (shinny sides out), one layer each of cotton-batting and Insul-Bright, with a copy of the pattern on top and pinned it a couple of places.
With the red thread in, I machine sewed the dice outlines and the wood grain, and thought they were looking a little lumpy and crooked but pretty good. It didn't go in the ditch till I started to fill in the individual dice faces. Either I've gotten really outta practice at this needle point, or I was never really all that good at it. These crooked, warped, little skulls were taking way too long. With eight more faces, that's about twenty two more tiny skulls and the red bias tape to go, this potholder was not going to be ready this week. Bummer.

Now that the wedding's over and the time crunch with it, I still like this sloppy weird potholder and I'll probably finish eventually (22 more skulls, dam). I did learn content density can bite ya quick inna quilt. But I found out later that line detail isn't the only kind of content density that can blow the time budget for a project.