Loons

I set myself a teeny goal a couple days ago. As I hadn’t stepped foot into the sewing room for several days, and all the parts to my Loon wall hanging were gathering dust first on a table in the living room, then, strangely, under the piano–we’d moved the project there when we needed the table to play Gloomhaven–I knew I needed to set a goal before something disastrous happened to all that work I’d done cutting and wonder-undering.

(Gloomhaven, if you don’t know, is a cooperative game where the goal is to kill monsters. We have the more basic Jaws of the Lion version, which has so many bits and pieces and rules that we’re still discovering new things 9 scenarios in. I can’t imagine how complex the original version is.)

My goal was this: to sew the borders to the background fabric. It was an easy task that shouldn’t take me too long. I could easily finish before I needed to get dinner ready.

But once I got started, I kept going. (Dinner was a little late that night!) I thought I’d just iron down a few pieces. But then it became apparent that there were many overlapping parts that nearly everything would need to be placed before any ironing could occur.

So what started out as just a few lines of straight sewing turned into this:

I made a few changes to the original pattern. Inspired by the colors of autumn outside our front door (and hours of leaf blowing), I chose a fall theme when choosing fabric for the trees. The original pattern used all green for the trees. As I didn’t have a separate scenic fabric for the top half of the background (behind the loon), I added my own scenic extras. I added some extra plants in brown behind the black plants, a few cattails, and a pair of duck silhouettes flying away in the distance. The original pattern was mainly done in shades of grey and black, but out of necessity (since I didn’t have a lot of different fabrics in those shades in large enough pieces), I added a bit of color in the border with the blue fabric.

Now it’s time to do some quilting. UGH! I know this project will linger in an unfinished state for a while as I procrastinate doing the part I don’t enjoy by starting yet another project.