Of Birthdays, Blogiversaries, and Swooning............

"Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith."  -Henry Ward Beecher

OK this week I was obsessing on a wall hanging to give my Sis for her birthday..........I'm like that.........going along my merry way when out of nowhere a project jumps out at me and I can't think of anything else until I finish it...........This is one of the reasons that, until recently, I have been unable to have any UFO's...........I just can't stop until it's finished!

And the other thing with me is that it is hard for me to really plan a project ahead of time because it goes through so many adaptations and changes that by the time I'm done, quite often, the final project is very different from the original project born in my head..........

Alright now that you have the disclaimer so I will go on with the story.......

I found some adorable Alice in Wonderland Motif fabric awhile back intending to do something for my Sis for her birthday......Alice (or maybe more appropriately).... Lewis Carroll is one of her heroes.......Originally I think I was just going to make some Alice hexies for her but I ran across a Red Queen Project which is a take-off on one of the illustrations from the original Alice in Wonderland book.
Here is a photo of the project I found.......a beautiful pattern which you can find at Robin's Quilt Nest

The Original Illustration from A-I-W Book

In case you haven't figured it out........I'm not good at waiting once I've decided on a project so instead of ordering the pattern I thought I could probably adapt it somehow so I printed the illustration, got out my handy dandy tools and began...........

         I wanted to "dress" the queen up in some "finery" so I decided to construct her, more or less, in the way we do a crazy quilt block using "Queenly" fabrics and shiny ribbons. 
I had an Royal flush cheater panel that I decided to incorporate into the mix and while on a stash building hunt to Hobby Lobby found a bag full of ribbon and notions at the bottom of the remnant pile for $2.50.............it had this strip of white roses adornment which, I guess is used for Prom dresses and such..........

I was pretty sure I could paint the white roses red with some nail polish.  As many Alice fans would recall.....the white roses were planted by mistake so in order not to upset the Red queen and lose their heads, the cards were painting the roses red........

Below is my version of "painting the roses red", which I can do since many people say I'm a card....(padum pum!..........OK...guess I should stick to quilting and forget the stand-up routine)

ok so anyway........here is how the final project turned out.........

I did FMQ on the center panel and here was born another triumph from a mistake:  I had been doing some zig-zag before changing out the presser foot to the FMQ foot and had forgotten to change back to the regular straight stitch before doing the FMQ..........consequently the FMQ has a sort of choppy...crazy look to it which I liked for this project!           

I also tried to quilt some "rabbit holes" on the side sashing and didn't do a great job but got a lot of good practice........in the end I was really pleased with how it turned out in spite of all the mistakes but more importantly.......

 my Sis loved it!

Oh!  Almost forgot the "Swooning" part of this blog..........I have decided to get in on the Swoon Craze...........how can you not love a block that is so huge?  Sounds like a win-win situation to me..........create one block and have a mini quilt done all at the same time!  So until further notice I guess the Swoon will be my next obsession.............

and also the blogiversary part.........February 23 is my First Blogiversary so stay tuned for "Ida's Honest to Goodness REAL First Blogiversary Giveaway" coming soon!

Tonight is a work night for me so guess I'd better go get ready...............hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!..................TTFN!