Trying to make the right kind of progress

I've been thinking a bit about what I can feasibly get done between now and the end of the year. I've started the Maine quilt but that's a project specifically to work on at the Country School Quilters monthly retreats. I want to start a new quilt, Antelope Canyon, but I have lots of postcards to make for Christmas and my to-be-quilted pile is, well, piling up. 

I've decided that Antelope Canyon can wait until the Maine quilt is finished and it will be my next CSQ retreat project. My sewing room is going to be dedicated to making postcards and small gifts for the next few months and I'm going to try to spend most of my time quilting. 

Back in June I quilted this mini-mandala (about 18" square) as a practice for a larger mandala.

That was over 4 months ago and I've done just about every other project that I can think of to put off loading this one. I finally reminded myself that I picked this particular mandala to quilt first because I don't particularly like it. It's pink after all and I really dislike pink. I gave myself permission to quilt it and then throw it away if I hate it. 
​That was all I needed to get started.

Over the past year or so I've worked up several ideas on paper and then started transferring guidelines to the fabric with Crayola washable markers. You can see that I like changing my mind a lot. This is exactly what's wrong with me as a quilter. I always think there's a better idea in some other corner of my brain. But I eventually shut my mind up and started quilting in the bone structure of the quilt.

Then I made, what I think is, my first mistake. I curved cross-hatched the 4 diamonds in the center. Why is it a mistake? Well, I didn't have another place on the quilt to do the same cross-hatching. I really feel like motifs need to be repeated. I also think it's too dense but I'm not picking it out!

I fixed that problem by creating cross-hatched corners. A mistake done twice doesn't look so much like a mistake. That's where I currently stand. I need to finish the cross-hatching and then I'll move to the white areas with some blue thread. 

The back is solid white to show off the perfect tension that I get from my Innova!

The postcard shop is also busy so I have the first ones to share tomorrow.