Progress and Obsession and the line between them

So I'm trying to make progress on 2 things outside of my work (which is already going much better than the entire month of December did- whew!). Those two things are running (more specifically getting back to where I was before the Cold Of Doom hit) and the baby quilt.  The end is in sight on one of these things.  Since I can't run more than a mile with getting dizzy and nearly passing out, it must be the quilt.

I wish this quilt were going as well as my other Swoon quilt.  I have narrowed down the reason to the crappy purple fabric.  The bolt of fabric claimed that it was 100% cotton, which doesn't explain why it stretches in some places and burns while crinkling in other places.  The Batik fabric (the bright painted fabric) is lovely and I will certainly be working in Batiks again.  Delightful, cuts well, keeps its shape while being pinned into submission.  And then there is the purple fabric that does this when you iron the seams flat....

That was a straight line of fabric before I ironed it.  And so when one fabric shrinks randomly and the other fabric holds true, it makes it very hard to have crisp corners in your quilt.  So after quite a bit of swearing, seam ripping, cutting more purple fabric and etc I decided that it's for a baby.  Who isn't going to care if the corners are perfectly matched up.  And if the baby isn't going to care about it, I perhaps shouldn't care so much either.

Which is a good thing, because when I got all of the squares done and tried to combine them, it got even worse.  It because very obvious why the crinkles were happening at an angle.  This isn't a balanced fabric.  The warp is stronger in some places, the weft is stronger in the some places, there's no two consistent inches.  So I'd cut a straight line and pick it up to find it crescent-shaped and not very good at all.  Wasted a lot of purple fabric recutting trying to make it work, ended up having to do very small borders to avoid buying more awful purple fabric.

Lesson learned?  Don't buy quilting fabric at JoAnn Fabrics.  There's lots of reason, but crap fabric that warps your project is one of them.  I even had to fight a Mennonite lady for that bolt! I got what I deserved and she was saved from making a crap dress.

Over 2 nights I got it assembled and the quilt top done- yay!  So I sewed my backing together real fast and dug out my super exciting fusible batting- BRILLIANT! Anyhoo, got my top all fused to the batting and picked it up to move it over to the backing and the batting falls off like I hadn't just spent 45 minutes fusing it on.  ARGH!  So don't spend the extra few bucks to get fusible batting- it's crap.  So now my quilt top is pinned to the back while sandwiching the batting which isn't as big as I thought it would be...and I decided to call it a night before I torched the whole quilt.

This is not the quick and easy baby quilt I thought it would be.