An Obsession

ob·ses·sion

 [uhb-sesh-uhn] noun the domination of one's thoughts or feelings by a persistent idea, image, desire, etc.

I think most people have obsessions, at least in the minimal sense. You might be obsessed with a delicious food you believe you can't do without (although, I'll bet you could), or a sports team, (Go GIANTS!!) or a physical pastime (I know some really "dedicated" cyclists).

Personally, I've always been ga-ga for alphabets and numbers. Anything with a digit, word, name, especially if it's a fun or unusual font. Last year I happened upon a Moda blog hop. Three blogs a day for a couple of weeks and a pattern for a letter of the alphabet at every site--Yippee!! I rose early every morning to download the patterns, kept them in a pretty pink folder, collected striped and polka-dotted fabric from my stash waiting for them all to be revealed before I began.

As an added bonus, they included patterns for not only numbers from 0-9 but several punctuation marks too! I had to make the quilt even though I had no earthly need for an alphabet quilt. I know no one having a baby, don't even have a sister OR a SIL to anticipate a niece or nephew. Yes, I have grown children of childbearing age and they even have spouses (7 years each) but, nahh, that's too much to hope for.

Still, I made this adorable quilt anyway and I enjoyed the process SO much! Those blocks are 4 1/2" x 5 1/2" and were pretty darned tedious to make--but I loved every 1"x 5" border strip on every block and every 1"corner square to round out some of the letters. Those 4 non-letter blocks are tiny hand appliqued critters designed by me (I didn't like the pieced block in the pattern).

It's now pinned and ready to quilt (with, what else? a 'cheater' alphabet fabric on the back!) Who will be the lucky recipient? One can only hope.

UPDATE:

This is my finished alphabet quilt, only 40" x 40", winning a blue ribbon at my own Valley Quilt Guild's quilt show in March. The title of the quilt is, "For When A Grandbaby Comes Along". When our daughter saw this quilt, she fell in love with it. I raised an eyebrow and told her it could be hers one day. Her reply was, "I think we're going to have to seriously discuss having a baby!"