Nose To The Grindstone Finally Paying Off

Good news!  The Merrimac Dresden blocks are almost finished!

After working on the Crumb Houses last week, I went back to these Dresden blocks figuring I'd have the top done by the time this week's Tuesday Crumb Along rolled around and could return the focus to the houses.  But for some reason I was dragging, not speeding along on these.  Sunday my husband and sons went to the NY Comic Con and I thought I'd have a Quilt-A-Thon day to myself.

 Instead I only got a few blocks done to finish the third row (but did get a lot of rest otherwise).  I really want to get this top done now because in addition to the new Crumb project (and finishing the quilting on the old one), I have a Halloween quilt project that was supposed to have been started already!  Not wanting to add even more flip flopping between projects, I decided to focus on getting this one done before moving on (or back) to other projects.

The opening picture showed the four rows I have of the five to be done.  On the machine is one block towards the fifth row.  Funny thing about that:  After completing three rows on Sunday, I went to set up the last two rows of blocks.  I was running low on Dresden blades and needed to know if I needed to cut more.  For some reason at that point, I thought I was short one background.  And of course, I didn't have enough of that particular background fabric left to make a block.  I did have enough of another background but it had to be pieced together.  Then to have enough blades to fill all the blocks, I had to do some "Poverty Patching" of what was left of my blade fabrics.  When I was done I had this:

I worked on the blocks again and when I finished the fourth row yesterday and put the blocks up on the design wall, I found that I had an extra block!  I don't know how that happened and now the pieced block and blades may be going on the back as a label.

There is still a lot to do:  finish the last row of blocks, blanket stitch them to their backgrounds, sew circles over the centers of the plates, border each of the blocks, put the center of the top together and then piece the outer border.  O.k. just listing all that tells me this top is not so close to being finished after all.  But as Michele of the "Distracted Quilter" blog so perfectly expressed in a recent post (in both text and video), you have to keep taking steps (no matter how small) toward your goal if you want to reach it.  So I will put my focus on the process and not the end because I already know the answer to the question "Are We There Yet?"!