Hi all,
I don't know about you but I was going a little stir crazy after staying at home for weeks except to run to the grocery store or pharmacy to pick up supplies. My cat was delighted I could spend so much time with him and I'm sure he's going to think this a way of life! And, no, I don't give him extra treats all the time even though he'd be happy if I'd comply with his requests.
To fill all this time, I actually cleaned by sewing studio, not once but at least twice. (It's a mess again, but oh well, it was organized for awhile.) As I was going through containers and cabinets, I ran across the scraps I had carefully cut from projects long ago. I had several shoe boxes with strips 1 1/2", 2" and 2 1/2" and squares of various sizes. What a goldmine! These need to be made into a quilt, I thought. I started putting together a small log cabin block with the squares and strips. At first I thought they were pretty ugly because I was too random with the colors. Everything looked like mud. So I scraped those squares (I made 10 or so) and then picked color families starting with a red square, then a light round and then a blue round. This looked a whole lot better once I had a group of them. I put them up on my design wall with a lime green sashing. Pretty bold, you might say, but I love it. Now I just have to finish that quilt
Because I like to work on multiple things, I moved on to tackle a Stack n Wack project. I had planned to take Mary Strinka's class in April and had bought some interesting looking fabric that I thought would make a pretty project. After carefully lining up six identical repeats of the fabric, I cut 4" strips and then cut 60 degree triangles from each strip. The result was very fun with lots of movement in the design. To offset the blocks, I'm going to add another triangle of turquoise blue in between which should make all the blocks pop out.
I've also been watching You Tube videos as I sew and learning a lot of valuable information. I ran across a video blogger by the name of Karen Brown who has a vlog called Just Get it Done. She has an amazing about of energy and shares her tips and tricks for all kinds of quilty things. One of my favorites was all about what to do with batting scraps. Using her advice, I pulled out my bags of scraps, organized them by type, cut them into common lengths and then started to sew some of the same batting types together to make larger, ready-to-go batting for my wall projects. It was simple and only took a few hours of my time. What I was left with were the smallest of strips and scraps and Karen had a plan for those, too. She suggested cutting them up with a rotary cutter into tiny chunks and using them in a pillow or pet bed. Guess who's getting a new cat bed real soon? (but don't tell him or he'll think he's getting a treat!)