I Get to Enjoy My Quilted St. Patrick's Day Table Runner for 30 Hours Before I Have To Put It Away

One year ago, I had the idea to make a table runner for St. Patrick's Day using a deep cut from my Ancestry DNA test. My family has been in America for shockingly long considering how poor we still are. You'd think that people who were in the country before it became a country would have built up some kind of generational wealth by now, but I guess my people were too busy subsistence farming in the asshole parts of Kentucky and Arkansas to enslave other people's ancestors or steal land from the indigenous populations. I'd tell you that it's nice not to have that history of wrongs on my conscience, but somehow they all ended up fighting on the wrong side of the Civil War anyway, sigh.

Anyway, before they lived life in America working all the least profitable vocations and never buying any good land, all my ancestors came from around the Great Britain-ish area. I've got at least a couple of ancestors who emigrated in the early 1700s from Wiltshire, which you know I find super exciting because they knew Stonehenge! I know of a couple more ancestors who came from York, which tracks because Ancestry says about 22% of my DNA comes from northeast England. My DNA as a whole, according to Ancestry, is basically an amalgamation of the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes, with a few Celts thrown in. Ancestry says I'm 6% Welsh, which in my mind perfectly explains how I picked up Middle Welsh so easily in grad school (I haven't read it since, but we don't need to talk about that part) and 11% Irish.  

I've never tried my hand at Irish Gaelic, but my heart tells me that I'd also pick it up super quickly. I am not taking questions about this statement at this time.

The Welsh lineage has yet to reveal itself in my family tree, but the Irish part does track, since I can trace a couple of McClanahans who emigrated from County Tyrone in Ireland way back in the 1600s. Congratulations on missing the Potato Famine, guys, but you literally landed in Virginia, so why the hell did your grandkids decide to move to a stupid rocky mountain in Arkansas and cosplay famine living?

I say from the middle of bumfuck Indiana, where I own approximately 6 acres of property that tries very hard to be a wetland, including a 1,000 square foot house that tries very hard to fall apart at the seams at all times. Literally--I got up yesterday morning to discover that one of the bathroom floor tiles--WHICH IS PRACTICALLY BRAND NEW!!!--had worked itself loose, and there's a section of the family room floor--ALSO PRACTICALLY BRAND NEW!!!--abutting an outside wall that has clear signs of water damage that mysteriously just appeared one day. It's almost like having a whole entire giant elm tree fall right on top of your house is just generally bad for it!

FYI for the future when I one day need to try to sell this money pit: I HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE OF ANY FOUNDATION ISSUES. Also, I'll for sure be selling this place as-is. I don't want to have to replace the terrible windows, there's definitely something squirrely with the septic system but it still works fine so I'm just ignoring it, and I think there's a human grave about ten feet from the back deck.

ANYWAY. I had the idea for a St. Patricks' Day table runner themed on my Irish DNA a year ago, but as of a month ago, that project still looked like this:

This is Spelling Bee, by Lori Holt, and it is my favorite sewing book. I hog my library's copy, so if you want it you'll have to put it on hold.

Fortunately, I made plenty of progress after that, and two weeks ago, the project looked like this, all pieced and ready to be backed, quilted, and bound:

And then I got kind of busy at work, and then the younger kid came home for Spring Break, so I did not touch it again until yesterday, when I spent half the evening binging The Crown (I LOATHE how everyone treated poor Diana OMG! And damn but Scully goes hard on that Margaret Thatcher dialect!) and doing this:

And now I have this!

Because I did all the quilting literally yesterday, I didn't feel like going to the store for green thread and convinced myself that it's more eco-friendly and a better embodiment of my vow to boycott the economy to use the closest match that I had on hand, which was only slightly greenish and looks frankly pretty darn brown now that it's covering the table runner and can't be taken back:

Whatever. It's not perfect, but it's done, and that's much, much better!

Other than that--and, okay, the fact that I need to do probably one more round of quilting right there by the binding--I LOVE my new table runner. I'm obsessed with how the piecing turned out, and I like the look of the quilting (if not the color of the thread, dang it):

I'm not sure if the joke is too obscure, or just too stupid, though, because everyone I've tried to show my table runner to looks kind of nonplussed about it, and then when I explain the joke--("It's my Ancestry DNA! It says I'm 11% Irish!") they honestly somehow look even more nonplussed, but whatever. I think it's hilarious, and I'm the only voting demographic!

This morning, I got to start my St. Patrick's Day with my brand-new table runner, coffee and a chapter in my latest book--

--and then we hung out together while I worked and ate a delicious sandwich and drank more coffee:

Now excuse me, because I have seven more hours to enjoy my table runner before it's no longer St. Patrick's Day. Time to pour some Bailey's and listen to my B*Witched/Sinead O'Connor/Kingfishr/Pogues Spotify playlist!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!