FO Friday: Lowering standards, raising the joy

Thank you for your patience on Wednesday, and congratulations if you managed to plough through all my works in progress. That’s more than I’m managing! And thanks too for the kind messages. I’m ploughing on and trying to dig myself out of this rut, although with kindness rather than strictness. I really don’t believe you can just ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’, mostly because if you pull on your bootstraps, you fall over!

But I’m getting my house in order, both literally and figuratively, and my three link parties each week are really helping to motivate me. In fact, I spent my lunchtime frantically stitching so that I’d have something show you today. See how much I love you guys? Before we get to that, though, I wondered if you’d seen these fab contests out there on the wilds of the internet.

Scarlet Dash is giving away a fab crochet book here, while Lizzet at The Fabric Loft has an Amy Butler bag pattern up for grabs here. And if that’s not enough for you, Maureen Cracknell is giving away a beautiful fabric bundle to celebrate 2 years of blogging. Just 2 years! If you haven’t seen her patchwork until now, spend a while clicking around her blog after you enter the contest. Or maybe I should just encourage you to read the blog and not dilute my chances too much!

So, are you ready now for the big ta-da?

Ta da!

And the back

The pattern was sort-of improvised by me, based on one I saw at Darn it and Stitch. It’s a mixture of whole charm squares and four patch blocks and is a classic example of why you should measure twice and cut once. Of course I completely forgot to take all seam allowances into account and my 4 patch blocks ended up a different width to my whole charm squares. I only figured this out when I’d sewn them all together and trimmed the rows to be the same height.

And of course not all my four patch blocks have completely matching seams.

And then when I was sewing the rows together, I sewed one on upside down.

And when I was drawing on my quilting lines, I kept shifting my template. Oh, okay, it was just a plate, but it worked.

And all my quilting stitches are completely different lengths.

And the binding is more tacked than sewn on.

But do you know what, I really, really don’t care. This is why crafting is so good for me. In most areas of my life, unless I do things absolutely and totally perfectly, I consider myself a complete failure. It’s one of the lies depression tells you, like handing you a stick to hit yourself over the head with, the worst of it being that you do it to yourself.

Except I’m not like that with crafting. I love using the things that I make, loose ends, wonky seams, non-matching fabrics and all. I always forget to sew in ends, I can’t sew a straight line to save my life, and making things makes me so happy I can’t begin to tell you. Here, let me show you why:

Isn’t it pretty? Isn’t it happy? And it all comes with the added bonus that it’s keeping my knees warm under my desk.

Both the charm squares and the backing fabric, which is also the binding fabric, came from M is for Make. I hand-quilted it, using a small plate to draw circles around then using a bluish crochet thread that I picked up in a charity shop at some point. The squares are Just Wing It by Momo and the backing is Griffith Mum by Alexander Henry (which is still on sale and I’m very tempted to get some more of, because it’s deeply happy-making). And just to really make your weekend, there’s a voucher code for M is for Make to give you 10% off when you spend £50. Check it out here.

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to do this, but this week I can legitimately link up with everyone else at Tami’s Amis here

ETA: I’ve been trying to comment on some FO Friday posts, but some Blogger sites are having trouble with my credentials – none of them work! I think I need to disentangle this blog from my other one (they’re both on the same ID), but something tells me it’s not going to be a simple job…