Is there any energy left?

Wow - for some reason I am completely wiped out lately!  No particular reasoning behind it, that just appears to be the way of things.

I'd like to blame the quilt, or the weather, or the child, but none of these things are really to blame. I just feel washed out for no reason at all.

Waiting for the final course results is of course not helping, it's like a 'side order' of stress while hoping for the best!  And of course, it being the last module, I need to pass it in order to finish off the degree.  So I will admit to a small amount of trepidation - I don't think I have done badly enough to fail, but I will still worry till the results are here and gone.

And then I can start to book graduation numbers etc.  Eeek!!

I love it when a plan comes together

Cue the A-Team music and start recording the montage.

Erm well...not quite.

But finally, I have begun the part of my OU journey that appears to have caused me the most trouble, or at least certainly had as many false starts as any of my modules along the way.

What gave me this much stress?   Deciding upon a plan for my graduation quilt, mentioned in a previous post.

Now, I knew only for certain that there should be frogs... As my reader will know, frogs are where the whole Object Oriented Programming world began for me.  So they hold a special place in my heart when thinking of the journey as a whole.  But how to incorporate the frogs, and what else alongside them?  How to make it significant and meaningful without being twee?  How to not make it into just a frog quilt, but something that told more of the tale?

I looked at frog panels, hmm too froggy.  I looked at frog pictures to quilt as outlines...either too childish or too complex.  Nothing was quite right.

Then, finally, after finishing up the last assignment and vegetation on the couch for (to be fair, quite....) a while, a Facebook group called Quilt As You Go! provided the answer I was looking for.  The idea behind quilt as you go is to break down the process and make smaller quilt panels then join them together to build a bigger quilt.  I'd been wanting another go at the process, so it appealed to me.

So the design is quite simple - strips of material including small amounts of froggy fabric will build up into squares, being quilted to the backing material as they go.  The modular nature of this appeals to me too, just like the OU degree it will have been built up piece by piece, and amount to an overall achievement in the end.  But each piece in itself is an achievement along the way.

So far I have 11 completed squares, the plan is to get to 16, lay things out on the bed and work out what the next part of the plan is.  I completed 17 modules to finish this degree, so a little part of me wants 17 pieces, but that's not a given or guaranteed figure yet.  I'm just enjoying being back at the machine for the first time in ages, with plans that should get me to the end of the quilt before graduation day in November.

More pics to come as I get my head round each stage of the process - and of course only 13 days until the final result(s) are due out too.  Whoopie!!