I am plagued by indecision. Plan A was to tie this quilt, using crewel wool, because every time I have used embroidery floss, it all comes out in a few washes and I end up machine quilting the whole thing anyway. First, I tested all the various yarny-looking crewel fibers I have lying around to make sure they were wool. I held a flame to the ends of the yarn to see if it would melt [don’t do this at home unless you are prepared to quickly and safely extinguish any accidental fires] and people? It stank, a lot. Burning hair. Ugh. The dog left the room. I tested each unlabeled skein this way, and the acrylic ones melted, leaving a hard ball of black plastic at the end. Wool will burn, but the blackened tip crumbles away into ash. Anyway, once I had the actual wools all sorted out, I started tying, and immediately I began to wonder if they looked like they were coming out already.
I tied a few more, but the paranoia got to me, and I switched to Plan B, which was to hand quilt this monster (I know, right?) sashiko-style, using pearl cotton.
This moved along very quickly, and I got almost a quarter of the way through the quilt in one evening, but then…I started second-guessing it.
Too wobbly. Too close together. Too…I don’t know, too quilty. I don’t want this thing to look like an ill-constructed washboard. I stitched a few more rows, further apart this time, to see if that made me like it any better, but then I began to worry about the wool batting and whether it would survive the laundry if I quilted too far apart. So now, I’m thinking of going back to Plan A, and in the meantime, I’m just crocheting the striped blanket and watching Hatfields and McCoys [OMG, Bill Paxton, have you lost your mind? Kevin Costner is trying to be nice! And I doubt that was even your pig, so get over it.]
What to do?