BOM progress...?

Some progress in the handwork department. My patchwork group has been busily making the BOM that Lorraine sent us in its entirety at the beginning of this year. Yesterday was patchwork day so we gathered to work on the BOM blocks.

Uh-hum. I think we have made an important discovery which I wish to announce here.

NEVER, NEVER, NEVER take apart a BOM and try to do it out of order! It doesn't work!

One is supposed to get a BOM packet and follow the directions, right? Make the block. Some months there is extra fabric to add a border that month, or start corner squares etc. Some months it says

"Okay, now you have enough fabric for the center borders so make 6 strips of 2" each and sew them together and while you are at it, don't forget those 4 strips of 1" that you make every month for the inner borders and by the way this month you need to make two of those so double the strips."

Fabric? WHAT FABRIC? Is there any of this fabric in that basket where we dumped everything together?

The blame is not with the BOM creators! The fabric is THERE! Somewhere... But because our group innocently emptied all the BOM packets and handed them around to people to work on the blocks SIMULTANEOUSLY, now we've got PAGES of instructions that have been mixed up, and fabrics DANGLING from handbags and packets, and fabrics that are the same but DIFFERENT CUTS depending on the month they came and we DON'T REMEMBER!!!!

Mrs. Furui and I spent a couple hours trying to locate all the instructions, put them in order, figure them out, find the fabrics needed, compute what we could cut from where that wouldn't mess up the remaining directions, sew on what we could find before we lost it again, and all the while muttering that maybe the BOM wasn't complete. Maybe the fabric was never sent to begin with. It was. It was all there. Just in different forms than expected. And yes, if we'd read the directions we'd know, but since I am the only one willing to wade through the English directions (12 packet fulls!) we were confused (to put it mildly.)

Okay. We got 6 blocks and their inner borders made. Three ladies were furiously trying to get the embroidery done so that all nine blocks could be put away until next month. They were still squinting at their embroidery when I left.

So ladies. If you ever do a BOM be sure to complete each block and follow each month's directions before the next BOM packet arrives.

But you already knew that. I wish we had.