Can you believe it?

Because I hardly can.  I finished the disaster quilt.

This quilt has been haunting my UFO pile for a long time.  It gets its name from the fact that it used to be a disaster.  I think I started and pieced it sometime in 2007.  It's from a book by M'Liss Rae Hawley about fat quarter quilts. I can't remember the name of the pattern, and I am away from home right now--I'll have to update later.  Anyway, for anyone who has done quilts with LONG pieces like this one, you know that you need to cut them just right (and not WOF).  Once you are ready to sew all the rows together, I paired them up, then paired up the pairs, and so on.  This would all be fine, but I sewed them all from top to bottom.  This means that when I finished, there was a weird curve to the entire quilt.  You can't just trim an end to fix it either.  I got super discouraged and put it away for awhile, thinking that I would just cut up the whole thing and re-piece it into something different. Instead, I came back to it in the fall of 2009 and took it all apart. I measured each column and made sure they were all the same size. Then I sewed them back together, this time alternating the direction of sewing, which stabilizes the whole thing. I was much happier with it this time.  But I still didn't quilt it.  So I finally found some fabric in my stash that is a sort of shiny red fabric (I think it may have some sort of taffeta in it?).  I quilted it with soft zig zags down the long striped sections, and then just straight lines to frame it.

I actually really like this quilt now!!!!

The quilting really makes it much more interesting. Anyone got better names for it than the disaster quilt? Because I think it might stick around for awhile.

And that makes four of six items off my list for the Spring to Finish Challenge! Woo hoo!