How Do You Eat an Elephant?

2002 was my in-laws' ruby wedding anniversary and I had upon the idea to make them a memory quilt, using photos from their children and some I'd managed to scan from the family albums. I made up the squares, transfered the photos onto fabric and tacked together the quilt, but discovered as I set about sewing that it would not finished in time, so I showed what I had done and said that I would finish it as soon as I could. And then I got a crisis of confidence with the prospect of cutting out the batting and the backing cloth for it. I thought of ideas, of lying the quilt out on our bed so that I could pin the batting to the front, but my courage failed me. A few years passed, and then I discovered I would need to quilt parts of the quilt before I attach the batting and so I bought a big quilting frame and the front of the quilt progressed a bit more, but the frame was too big for our front room where I worked on it and so it had to be placed in our front porch and then it stood, leaning against the wall, looking at me accusatively. Every so often I get the frame set up in the front room, work a little bit on the quilt and then manoeuvre it back to the front porch. Then it stood there and the photos started to lighten slightly in the sun. I dismantled the frame, rolled the quilt up and put it upstairs - another thing started but not finished and beat myself up about it for a few years longer. I couldn't move forward because all I could see was the whole - the whole of the elephant, and I couldn't see a way around, a way to eat that particular elephant.

Then a few months ago I had an idea. I was thinking about all the beginnings that I make, but how few middles and ends I often achieved and this got me thinking about the quilt and a thought came to me that I could make the quilt into a book. This would get around the problems of quilting such a large amount of fabric, it would get around the problems of displaying it and would move the project on, after years of stillness. It would however mean unpicking part of the quilt which had been based on 16x16in squares, but because all the blocks were the same size it would mean that they could be made up as pages all of the same size. So now I've unpicked the blocks and started again and finished my first double-sided page last month and am in the process of quilting the back of the second page so that its two sides can be quilted together to add leaves to this fabric photo album. So from the elephantine task I'd managed to break it down into more manageable task and get a start on those. And the answer to eating elephants? One bite at a time ...

xx