Cleaning Up the Hard Way

I'm still working on reorganizing my quilting areas, more so now since we'll have a family moving in with us for a month or two. I have projects I SHOULD be working on, but sometimes I get waylaid by a project screaming at me to work on it. I had four big blocks leftover from a Strip Twist I finished last year, and that wasn't enough to even make a baby quilt. When I came across the blocks, they called out to me, wanting to made into a quilt top. I didn't have a lot of purples or WOW fabrics left in my 2.5" strip drawers, but I grabbed what I had and pieced more stripsets for more blocks. When I finished with those, I realized I only needed two more quarter blocks to make a 3x4 setting, and with 15" blocks, that's a 45x60" kiddie quilt. I had some 3.5 strips I could cut down into 2.5" strips, made the extra two blocks, and this is what I ended up with...

I've already sewn this into a top, pressed it and it's hanging in the closet. Some purple binding will finish it off well enough, and I won't add borders. 

One of the weighted blankets I had made for a granddaughter met a tragic end, so I guess I'm not out of the weighted blanket business yet after all. I had a request for one for a grandson too. I haven't tackled the boy one yet, but I went though my scraps of fleece and got one up on the design wall for my granddaughter.

I've already sew this into rows, and hope to have the top finished shortly. 

I have blocks for several quilts lying around my sewing room, and I need to get those off my flat surfaces, so I can work on the projects I need to be working on. Most of those are from my scrapbusting projects, which I am still cutting for. I need to knock my Scrap User System down, because it's overflowing it's designating storage, so time to make a bunch of scrap quilt and clear those drawers out!

I got this baby quilt up on a design wall too, and I'm almost finished sewing the rows of this. I find it easy to work on multiple quilts at once, I know some people don't work that way, but it works for me. 

I've also been assembling the top of Visual Frustration. If you don't remember the quilt it's this one.

DH laid this one out, and he kept starting patterns but not finishing them, and he named it Visual Frustration. I hadn't worked on it for a while because the quillow project took over. Now that I've almost got the top together (four more seams to go!) I've decided I think its too long for the width. I had DH set it to use as many HST's as possible, which were leftover from another project. I hadn't planned on adding border, but now I want to, and to add to the Visual Frustration, each side will be different. I had some 1.5" strips left over from these fabrics, and by adding some black fabric for the bulk of the borders, I think I've got a fun idea on what to do with those borders. Again, not a project I need to be working on, but one that I'm excited to work on. Once it's a top, I'll be happy to set it aside, but I've learned if I'm really excited to work on something, it's best to go ahead and do it, at least to quilt top stage.

Sewing stuff up into quilt tops is a SLOW way of cleaning, but it's sometimes the way I work. I can let a quilt top hang in the closet for years and not have it weigh on my mind, but before it's a quilt top, it's causing stress. Those quilt tops in the closet have saved me multiple times, when I need a fast quilt. If one of those quilt tops fit the need, it's a quick finish to just baste and quilt a top, rather than starting from scratch. 

I am thinking about my deadline quilts too. I chose a pattern for the wedding quilt I need to make, and after hearing their color choices, I decided to do a gradient. They asked for black, white, and silver, and the pattern I was thinking of looks great as a gradient. I thought I was going to have buy fabric to do a decent gradient, but I think I came up with an acceptable one from stash. I had one different fabric I wanted to use in the middle, but I didn't have enough of it once I did all the math and figured yardage requirements. I think this will work though.

What do you think? Will that work? 

I'm working on so many things my mind is racing at night, filled with quilty ideas. I'm making progress though, so overall, I'm pretty happy with things.