You Have To Laugh, Don't You?

I'm not sure why we tend to look for 'The Funny Side' of most situations, is it just a British thing?... I know it feels good to laugh and goodness knows we quilting junkies laugh a lot. There's another saying, I'm sure you've heard it, 'You have to laugh... otherwise you'd cry', what does that mean?... Oh, I get it now... Eventually, when the quilt is finished, Joan might laugh about this quite disastrous occurrence, which has left her very unhappy,upset, demotivated, quite frustrated AND packing up and moving house! 

Joan The Shop has been working on the 'Chocolate Fish' quilt for well over a year, and that's not counting the many months of searching for all the perfect fabrics she needed. There's a great story to this quilt, and you will hear all about it soon enough.

Last week, another chapter was added to that story, the title of the new chapter? The Night The Mice Ate The Cheese...

 Now... are you laughing because the mice ate through Joan's quilt starting with the cheese fabric or have you taken a sharp, inward breath of disbelief? Do you feel some of the horror Joan felt when she saw what had happened to her lovely quilt?... It's actually worse than it looks.
If you've been visiting my blog for a while you'll know that Joan The Shop makes rather large quilts, each one pieced together one quilted segment at a time using our very popular, Apartment Quilting method. For this Fish quilt, we broke Joan's quilt down to manageable pieces by making the centre in two small halves then adding one last row of centre 'fish' blocks to each border, quilting them and apartment joining them to the centre... I hope this is all making sense... Believe me, it's been a lot of work. Joan's been making steady progress and there was only one border piece to add to finish. Joan had been hand stitching the backing joins one evening, at bedtime she folded up her quilt and tootled of for a good nights sleep. The mice must have had a busy night, not only did they eat through the cheese fabric, the wadding and backing of this piece... they actually ate through every block in a direct line down through the folded quilt... four layers, four big mouse eaten holes, they're about 3"!
It's been quite tricky to repair Joan's quilt. Fortunately she had spare pieces of the main fabrics so we've been able to appliqué invisible patches over the top holes, we'll carefully cut wadding patches, hole shape, and whip stitch them into place, then there'll just be appliqué patches to add to the backing... Joan wanted to cry when she saw what had happened to her quilt, no wonder eh. We shouldn't be laughing, it's a terrible story, but... Was it a coincidence that the little pests started eating the block on top, with the cheesy pictures, do you think they kept eating their way through Joan's quilted layers because they were wondering where the cheese flavour was?
I told Joan not to worry, the horrific event has added a little extra interest to the quilt's history. It doesn't matter if anyone notices the patches, in fact... I'm sure that, long into the future, everyone will be very curious as to why the patches are there... maybe Joan could make her label a bit bigger and include the story, surely the reader would be able to chuckle.