I don’t think I’ve sewn a thing since I’ve gotten back from the retreat earlier this month. But I’ve been playing in my fabric. My general rule of thumb is I don’t start the new Bonnie Hunter/Quiltville mystery quilt if last year’s is still in progress. Well, I got the borders on the one from 3 years ago, completed the one from 2 years ago (OK, it still needs a label), and finished the top from last year’s mystery. There should be nothing stopping me from doing this year’s mystery. But before the retreat I just didn’t think I wanted to start another big quilt since I have several big quilts that I want to finish over the next few months. But when I got home, there I was pulling fabric from my stash.
Pulling from my stash I ended up with turquoise for the blue, fuchsia for the red and at the moment I’m looking at purple for the green. But I have subsequently found my stash of lime green fabrics, so I might go with them if there is enough of them. Of course I could always go to the store, but I pretty much used up my fabric money on the road trip to Jackson back in June.
For the past few weeks I’ve been folding and sorting all of the fabric which has collected around here. Anything bigger than 10″ x 12″ has been folded and put away — mostly sorted by color, but that’s still a work in progress. Smaller stuff has been tossed into bags to be cut up into my version of Bonnie’s Scrap Users System. I’m finally getting around to dealing with the scraps I’ve been given over the past few years, my own scraps and those scraps that I bought. What was I thinking!
These bags are much fuller now. I think I’m down to maybe 3 boxes to be sorted, so I need to start cutting. But my pre-cut boxes are stuffed. So, I’ve stopped and had to sort through those boxes.
This is the “shirt box” size. It was stuffed with 2-1/2″ strips. I pulled them all out, pressed them, rolled them up by color then bagged them. There’s plenty of room in the box now. My 2″ strip box, which is “shoe box” size has even more room. But then again I did pull out anything shorter than 12″ and tossed it into the sacks to be cut up into bricks and blocks. My brick and block boxes are also being sorted and straightened, although they won’t be put into bags.
I will continue working through this process and hopefully do a bit of piecing over the next week. After Thanksgiving you’ll find me at my sewing machine. I have a Christmas wall hanging I need to finish, and who knows what else I’ll be working on. I need to find a couple of simple projects to take with me when I visit my sister-in-law. She’s learning to quilt. At this point I have no idea what I’m going to take. I suppose I need to give that a bit of thought as well.
