Easily Distracted

 I'm still thankful for deadlines, and those deadlines are keeping me going. I finished assembling three more quillow tops, and I've quilted one of those. Today I was working on cutting out the quillow pockets, and while searching for fabrics for the cotton side of the pocket, I came across a fabric that just kind of screamed at me to let it it out of the stash. 

I bought this fabric a few years ago, to make table runners for a wedding. I needed quite a bit of it for that purpose, but I ended up having some left. For that couple's first Christmas married, I used some of the extra to make them a set of placemats. The remaining bits have just been sitting in my stash, because the print is so large it's hard to use, and I didn't have enough for backing or borders of anything. I had a lot of strips 9" wide leftover from making the table runners, and one WOF piece about 1/2 yard. I decided to use this fabric for one of the quillow pockets, but that made the leftover fabrics even weirder sizes, so I really didn't want to put it back into stash. I decided I should be able to cut 8.5" squares from most of the pieces I had left, so I cut as many of those as I could after cutting the piece for the pocket. If I use an alternating block, I should be able to make a throw sized quilt. 

I pulled some other fabrics I thought might work for the quilt, and then I had to decide on an alternate block. There are a lot of options for 8" finished blocks, but I felt like I really wanted something that chained. I chose that block after scanning Block Tool and a couple quilt block books I have. I'm going to leave that as a bit of a surprise though. What would you choose for the alternating block? I debated all kinds of things, including things that don't chain, like Dresden Plates or Lemoyne Stars. I decided since this project is completely off track from what I should be working on, I didn't really want to mess with making it scrappy, because scrappy quilts take a lot longer to prep and cut. The cream background with sunflowers is a possibility to use for the border, but we'll see. The stack of teal fabric squares with sunflowers is all I could get from the fabric I had left, I have a few small pieces I'll cut down to 2.5" squares, but that's all that's it for that fabric. I have 39 squares, so I'm thinking 38 alternate blocks, which gives me 77 blocks total, set 7x11 for an 56x88" center. It's a bit tall and skinny, but I wanted odd numbers, and to use as much of the fabric as possible. Depending on what I do for borders, I could make it into a twin sized quilt. 

Thinking of an idea for a hard to use fabric is always a good thing. I'm looking forward to using the sunny yellows. I make very few quilts with yellow. I like yellow, I just rarely have anyone ask for yellow. Of course everyone asks me for blue, which I don't like, but somehow have the most blue fabric, even though I use it all the time! Seems to me the color you like least multiplies in your stash the fastest! The colors I like seem to jump out of stash pretty quickly. Purple is one of my favorite colors, and one I struggle to keep in stash. I seem to use it as fast as I buy it, but not for quilts for me, because I don't have a purple quilt. I really like green too, but I make a lot of blue/green/purple quilts. Hey, maybe I'm trying to "water down" all those blues with colors I like??? I don't mind doing patriotic colored things either, but red is my other favorite. I can only narrow my favorite colors down to three, Purple, green and red. I can't really choose between those three. 

I finished another Christmas present this week as week as well. It's all wrapped and ready to go. I have four more things I want to finish for Christmas, but we'll see. I think getting the three quillows I'm working on right now should be OK (I probably won't see the people they are for until New Year's anyway), but one thing I'd like done I've barely started. I ended up purchasing a gift in case I don't get it done in time. No one's feelings will be hurt, and then the homemade gift will just be a happy surprise later on. At least with an extra week before our family Christmas, I have extra time to see if I can finish what I want to get done. I'm not even sure a get together will be happening. It really depends on the weather, we had a very small get together on Thanksgiving, and kept everyone outside, and I'm hoping to do the same for family Christmas. If the weather doesn't cooperate, we may just skip it this year. At least we live someplace warm and gathering outside is a real possibility. If we can't do it safely, we won't do it at all.