It was true! There was my Cassette Tape Quilt! It had been selected by the Modern Quilt Guild to be in the LA Times!

We double checked the  LA Times  Website. There sits my quilt beside Carolyn Friedlander‘s. The fabric designer who’s fabric we were given, along with a handful of Robert Kaufman Kona solids last March from our guild, for a mini quilt challenge.

Violet Craft, Jacquie Gering, Amy Friend, we’re all included in the article! C’mon!! ( I’ve since discovered Lindsey Neil’s Instagram feed @penandpaperpatterns-WOW!) AND, did you see “On-Off-Standby, Pink” by Janice Smyth? Gaw all the quilts, A-maz-ING! Talk about good company! How the heck did this happen?!… Well, I know I need to thank the Modern Quilt Guild. So thank you Modern Quilt Guild AND thank you for creating this community… AND for being awesome!

My head’s still having a hard time wrapping it’s self around it. Talk about the little stinking quilt that could. Posting about it on Instagram while I was making it last March, my feed lit up like a Christmas tree. Requests for a pattern poured in, so I did it, I made a pattern . I recently released it on Etsy. Then feeling like, what the hell, mixed  in with a pep talk from Sherri, I submitted it to the Quiltcon show. It got in-YAY! (I’m going this year, which makes it extra exciting!) THEN this happened… And really, my only plan was to make a pillow for my bed with cassettes on it. Huh.

This! This quilt right here. It embodies all those things smashed in together! (Hang on, the explanation about the marriage proposal comes later)

I knew going into this project I only had three days to finish it. It absolutely had to be finished and submitted by the end of day 3! Which meant, I was going to be #sewinglikeamothertrucker.

Someone once said to me, “So let me get this straight? You buy fabric, cut it up, and sew it into new fabric?” YUP! That’s about right, a totally sane thing to do, if you ask me. (…and I have a sneaking suspicion you’ll agree)

Back in November 2014, our guild the FVMQG were given a mini quilt challenge for March’s Creative Stitches Show (March 27-28, 2015). We were given six Robert Kaufman solids and three Carolyn Friedlander fabrics. We were allowed to add RK solids and more prints from the same designer. (Thank god for Spool of Thread who carries all of RK solids!)

When I accepted this challenge I had no idea that mid January I would be in design school studying the Art and Business of Surface Pattern design. No idea, at all, that just kind of fell into my lap. (Note to self, I still need to blog about that)

Then Christmas happened. By then I knew the whole studying surface design was going to happen. I did have a working list of stuff that NEEDED to happen before my course started! This quilt was on that list. Needless to say, it didn’t get finished but I figured I still had time after the first module was completed to finish it.

Actually, at the February FVMQG meeting I was quite relieved to see so many RK challenge quilts completed since two of the quilts were directions I was going to take. That would have been like showing up at a party wearing the same dress. How embarrassing would that have been!

We were told at the guild, ONLY if we had a freak accident, like both of our arms were broken, would we have a good enough reason not to have our challenge quilts done. Fair enough, doing a challenge for Mr. RK is a big deal. There was no way I was about to let anyone down.

My husband was a superstar and took the reins at home while I hunkered down in the studio cutting, sewing, (cringe) seam ripping, plotting my way through twists and turns, and inevitably killing my playlist as I listened to it over and over.

From the beginning of this project I posted about it on Instagram. Which is where #sewinglikeamothertrucker came from. People started following my progress, likes and comments started to roll in. All of them encouraging, some downright hilarious.

They gave me huge gusts of wind (… not that kind of wind, wait for the rest of the sentence…) under my sails. (I know what you were thinking!)

Did I mention that this quilt needed to be completed by March 1st… and that I had to submit a second quilt AND submit a graduation piece for Design School too… Oh, and that we were leaving for San Francisco March 2nd? Sounds pretty crazy when I type it out like this.

In the end EVERYTHING got submitted (both quilts and my graduation project). We were packed and prepared to leave for the airport the next day. Phew!

What I wasn’t prepared for was, after submitting everything, at 8:35pm, I took my last picture posted it on Instagram, by the time we were ready for bed the quilt had receive over 50 likes! 50 likes c’mon! My mind was blown. For having 300ish followers, that was unreal.

Comments were coming in left right and center…

By the time we woke up, it was up to 100! Whaaa? And oddly enough we discovered the quilt had um… some marriage proposals. Yup, people wanted to marry it!

I love fabric-y people!

By the time we had gotten to San Francisco the likes were up to 200 likes with more comments, many requesting a pattern. Plus more requests for patterns of other stuff I had posted on my feed. Which I’m totally excited to do! Ka-Boom! That’s my brain and the gratitude I feel.

So there you go, that’s what #sewinglikeamothertrucker has to do with mixed cassette tapes, Robert Kaufman, Carolyn Frielander, a FVMQG mini quilt challenge and… a marriage proposal.