Now that the center 5×5 section of the quilt is sashed together, I had originally planned to start putting together my first triangle row, but I don’t have quite enough of the bottom row triangle blocks completed yet. Perhaps I’ll be ready to tackle that soon.

In the meantime, the blocks in the top right quadrant were almost complete, so that’s what I decided to sash and assemble next.

I worked on this sashing while a member of our family was sick and we were masking at home. It was kind of a pain (and by “kind of” I mean “really a lot”) to have the mask sticking up into my face whenever I looked down to stitch.

Needless to say, most of the sashing progress was made after everyone was healthy again and I was able to quilt with an unencumbered face.

There was a lot of redrawing of the perimeter stitching lines while sashing, as per usual. The photo makes the completed section look really lopsided, but that can be attributed to my poor photography skills – in real life, it’s actually fairly square.

Between the masked stitching and the rapid approach of the 7.5 year mark on this Dear Jane project, I was feeling more-than-slightly discouraged while sashing together these blocks last month … but then at retreat a few days ago, I changed my perspective.

One of my friends had asked me to bring my two completed sections to retreat, and then insisted we hang them up on the design wall. I was a little bit embarrassed about it (I even have a photo of me looking embarrassed standing next to them on the design wall).

But when I viewed those sections on the design wall from even a short distance, they looked pretty darn good, if I do say so myself. I was literally too close to the assembled blocks to see how they really looked. But when I take the long view (on this oh-so-long-term project), the outlook is good.