my abandoned plates

Long before I became a quilter, I slept under quilts my great-grandmothers had made and those patterns are the ones my memory immediately pulls up when I think quilt.  Those are the quilts I'm someday determined to make -- double wedding rings, and pieced baskets, and Dresden Plates...

All of the gorgeous Dresden Plate variations I've been seeing as part of the Dare to Dresden blog hop finally pushed me over the edge and I got my own plates appliqued onto the background...

And assembled into a little top...

This project seemed like a good idea when I started it. I made these Dresden Plates back in 2007 and put them aside as soon as I realized that they weren't going to lay flat and even if they did I had no idea how to applique them onto the background fabric anyway.  There were plenty of other non-quilty things for me to stress about around that time, so they got buried in the sewing room. Now and then, they'd resurface and I'd bury them again because by that time I'd also misplaced the pattern and the fabric that was intended for the pieced border. (Since then, I've realized the value of plastic storage boxes and become much better at keeping projects together!)

Last summer, I washed Lobster Sue and fell in love with the way that combination of batting and dense meandering crinkled up in the wash.  If I did that to my poor, deformed plates, they wouldn't need that fancy pieced border with its ice cream cone scallops...

It's taken me five more months to pull them out and get it done, but now they're on the background fabric and I'm wondering what all the fuss was about. If I could manage Grandma's Donuts, why couldn't I finish this one?  I think it was all of those little points.

To see more design walls, head over to Patchwork Times.