WIP Wednesday: Giving myself a break

Well that was a long hiatus, even for me! It’s been a bit of a tough week, as we’re trying to get our kitchen ceiling finished so that we can move on to the rest of the room. The thought of living without dust and with tiled walls is definitely exciting. The only drawback is that we’ve had to take the wall cupboards down to get at the ceiling, which means our living room is full of food and our hall is full of cupboard! I’m finding it hard to feel creatively inspired with the flat like this, so I decided to give myself a break for once and not worry about it. Things will calm down and everything will get back to normal eventually. I promise to show you pictures of the kitchen when it’s finished!

I have 2 main things that I’m working on right now, both of which might give you a sense of why I’m struggling a bit right now. First up is a quilt that I started about 10 days ago. My initial inspriation was this quilt which featured in the Modern Quilt Guild’s hundred days of quilting (fab series, by the way. Seriously inspiring!). I started with the idea of white squares and print triangles, but once I started sketching, I decided that I liked stripes more than diamonds. So I ended up with this:

Looks simple, right? I’m probably going to write up the pattern for this, and it will have in big letters across the top “KEEP REFERRING TO YOUR DIAGRAM”. I’ve had to re-do 3 squares so far, two before cutting them but sadly one only came to light when I came to sew it into the row. My attempt at repair didn’t work, so I’m just going to re-do the whole block. This was supposed to happen two nights ago, but since I failed to wind my bobbin four times, I decided that I was officially too tired to be sewing anything! This is how far I’ve got so far:

I was going to tidy the mess off the desk first, then decided leaving it all there helped explain why it’s such a struggle to get anything done at the moment!

For on the move, I’m still ploughing my way through my Dahlia shawl. After consultation with the hive mind (also known as my knitting group!), we decided that it was probably big enough for me to start the edging. I had some language issues with Row 1, since I forgot it was a US pattern and merrily stitched it completely wrong on my first attempt. And the second attempt. And the third. Apparently fourth time’s the charm, though, because I started the second row this morning. Here it is so far:

It won’t look like much until I’ve blocked it, and I’ve decided that I won’t block it too hard so that it retains the warm feeling that it has at the moment. That’s assuming that I ever get the edging finished! I have a week left to get it done to qualify as a finisher in my A-Z group, so if you see it again next week, you’ll know I didn’t succeed. I’m determined to get there, though!

To see if others are doing less ripping out than me this week, head over to Tami’s Amis here or by clicking the picture below.