365 Challenge finished!

For all my griping and headaches I have finished the 365 Challenge and it doesn't look half bad!

Except for one major wrinkle (and a couple of minor ones) I can't even see where the battlefield was. I fixed a couple wrinkles by hand (take the machine stitches out for a few inches, go back and hand quilt the lines. Yes, there is a difference but better than wrinkles and no one but me is going to go over this that closely.)

My 365 Challenge was started in May of 2007 after a couple blogging friends suggested we do this together. The original link is Leanne's 365 Challenge. There was a group to join that I didn't join so I have only come across a couple of finished 365 Challenges. The original instructions were to use beige fabrics in a larger size but I knew that would get much too unwieldy in my small house. But somewhere along the way I decided that even with dyed fabrics I was using (instead of beige) that this wasn't going to be a very spicy quilt so I added borders around each week. (I saw that idea somewhere but I don't remember where.)

It was so easy to forget to write the daily entries that I almost gave up on the whole thing a couple of times but you can see that I managed to go to the end. My 52nd year of life (started on my 52nd birthday.) I love all the colors. I love the fact that I used fabrics in the borders that I was using at that time for other projects. There are fabrics from Thelma and Connie and Nancy and Cassie and Amy and Liz.

2007-2008 marked the year of Leiya graduating from high school, the passing of Lemi. I can see I used bright colors when recording Leiya's milestone and dark colors when writing the last days of Lemi.

Friends are amazed that each of those blocks have so much writing in them. They laugh and say I have a journal that is open to everybody but no one will read (too much trouble to read all that English). Another comment was that at least I wouldn't have to worry about ghosts. WHAT?!! I don't know what you are talking about!

It seems there is a Japanese legend about a Buddhist priest who was visited by ghosts. In order to protect him, his friend wrote the Buddhist sutra all over his body which made the priest invisible to the ghost who was bothering him. Except that the friend forgot to write the sutra on the priest's ears so the ghost saw the ears, ripped them off and took them away. The priest remained earless but he was never bothered by ghosts again.

I'm not sure I appreciate the analogy of ghosts and Buddhist priests and sutras to my quilt...

Do I have to make a label for this?