I Have Surprised Myself

Well over a year ago my Aunt Jimmieann happened upon the library when they were clearing out their periodicals.  She noticed a box of quilting magazines on it's way out and asked if she could have it and they said yes, and months later we finally found the time to meet up so she could give them to me.  I think there's 30 magazines all told, all different types.  It's been so much fun looking through them in quiet moments, and I've learned a lot from them!

Some of them I'll pass along to others, but I have a pile of keepers.  Recently this one was on the top of the "Keep" pile:

It's the January 2007 edition of The Quilter Magazine, and my what a beautiful thing they put there on the cover!  I read about this quilt, how to make it, and the reason it was in the "Keep" pile is precisely because I wanted to make this quilt, one day.

When I say "one day" I mean when I'm much better at doing what I do.  This one was tricky!  So far I've only worked in squares, rectangles, or strips but this one had angles!  Kites and diamonds, both fussy cut, and very exactly stitched and matched to pull off those medallions.  And it would require the right fabric, with a certain size and shape motif in order to pull it off.

After playing with a number of half-yards yesterday, I'd laid them aside, by chance next to my pile of "Keeper" magazines, and by chance, with this one on top:

That's from Anna Maria Horner's Innocent Crush collection.  It hadn't made the cut for the quilt I'd been playing with because the blues in it were standing alone without anything to bring them along with the rest of the prints.  And then there was a moment in my evening when I realized THIS would make the PERFECT cuts for block like that quilt!  I couldn't wait to be done with dinner and boys' bedtime routine.  I was going to play!  I thought I'd play with cutting, goof off with seaming, and learn a few things while, unfortunately wasting some pretty fabric.

But the cutting went along much better than I expected:
(Though with my 1/2 yard I didn't have quite enough whole motifs and had to piece together 3 of them.)

And the seaming went along just as smoothly!  And so I took a chance matching a fabric at night, under my incandescent lighting, and within an hour I had something pretty special:

Nope, it's not perfect, but I am THRILLED; and for two reasons.  One, I completely surprised myself with how much I've learned without even realizing it, being able to meet those angled corners and stitch that scant 1/4" without any trouble at all, and the whole things lays completely flat without puckers.  Two, I've been struggling finding the right design for a purple flower gypsy quilt for my mom, but even though this fabric didn't originally make the cut for it, it's going front and center and the rest of the design is starting to come together in my head.

And it's making me wonder - what else could I be doing, that I'm holding back from, because I think I'm not good enough?