Home Again

Whenever I go away for more than a couple days, it takes me a little while to get into the swing of things again. Of course there was catching up on household chores to do, though DH did do the floors while I was away! Yay! I should have gone right back to my deadline projects, but I didn't. 

When I found out one of my nieces is having a girl next spring, my first thought was this was a chance to use up the fairy fabric I've had in a bin. I had a clear picture in my head of what I wanted to make, and then I'd use all the leftovers from the first fairy quilt and the baby quilt in a third quilt and bust all the bits and pieces leftover. The first fairy quilt had a lot of waste. I've since decided to do something else for my great niece after talking to my niece, but that project in my head wouldn't leave me alone. So, instead of working on deadline stuff when I got home, I made this quilt top instead.

 I'm really happy with how it came out, and since I had bonus HST's left from making these big stars, I incorporated those into the last quilt to be made from the fairy fabric. 

I now have all the blocks made for the last quilt, and I'm not sure how it's going to look. There are several different types of blocks going into it, it's literally just the dregs of the fabrics I bought for the first fairy quilt, the waste pieced bits from making all the original stars, plus just enough yardage to make the blocks all the same size. As it turned out, I had more fabric left than I remembered, and the third and last quilt from the night fairy fabric will be twin sized. I'll need to get that quilt on the design wall before I get a feel for how it will look.

Next on the design wall is a deadline quilt though!

This is the twin sized Star Wars quilt I'm making for a different niece's stepson. DH put it on the design wall for me, and I had already had him take down the top row before I thought to take a photo. You can't see the bottom couple rows in this photo either, but this gives you an idea what it looks like. There are 24 different Star Wars fabrics, two blocks with each fabric. 

As if I didn't have enough projects going, I decided to do Bonnie Hunter's mystery quilt this year. She's using a spring palette, so I decided to go Autumn. 

I'm using a solid burgundy as the background, though not this piece, I didn't have enough of it. I'll be using my stash of men's shirts for all the other colors. I've since dug through all my men's shirts and have more options in each color now. 

Actually, the first quilt related thing I did after getting home from DD#2's house was sorting all my men's shirts. I started with five containers of men's shirts. After sorting I have one of all neutral shirts, one of all blue shirts, one with the colors for the mystery, and one with all the other colors sorted by color. What happened to the fifth container? Well I pulled out all the shirts that don't read as one main color. If there wasn't a clear background color, like shirts with even width stripes, or checkered shirts, or really large scale plaids, I tossed those into a laundry basket, and I'm cutting those harder to use shirts into leader/ender projects for 2022. I got a ton of quilt tops made this year, and it's largely due to the fact I pre-cut the projects I used as leaders/enders. After doing the sorting, I realized sooner or later I have a lot blue/neutral men's shirts in my future! But that's not a project for next year, I'm still working with scraps and hard to use fabrics, and those will be my main focus, besides continuing to finish UFO's and deadline quilts. 

In case you are wondering, a week off did my arm a world of good, and I'll likely not start FMQ until next week so I'll have two weeks off of that, which will be even better. DH was joking he would buy a longarm and quilt all my quilts for me, and I told him go ahead. I prefer piecing to quilting anyway! He won't do it, but I'd definitely let him if he wanted to!