Happy National Quilting Day

Today is National Quilting Day, which I always seem to miss (thankfully, a friend sent me an e-mail nudge.) Every year I do try to make something quilted on or around the day, even if I don't post about it. For this year I decided to get my $2.95 bag of vintage giraffe fabric scraps and make a small quilt.

Here are the three giraffe novelty prints I have to work with today.

And here are the chevron prints I got in the bag. I'm going to press and measure them first before I decide on what sort of patchwork to do. I'll be posting pics throughout the day to show you my progress, so stop by if you want to see how I do.

5:11 pm: getting a bit of a late start as my guy and I went out to a farmer's market and ended up visiting some thrift stores and having lunch at a neat little diner we found. After I got home and walked our dogs I was finally ready to get started on my quilt by pressing all my fabrics.

After measuring I realized I don't have quite enough fabric to do a baby quilt in the patchwork pattern I chose, so I pulled a few more remnant fabrics from my stash.

I also dug into my scrap bag and pulled out these two pieces leftover from other projects which also might work.

This is the patchwork pattern I'm using: Yellow Brick Road by Atkinson Designs. It's easy, it always turns out nice and I've made about a dozen quilts with this pattern, so there will be no surprises.

11:59 pm: I got a lot done tonight, starting with cutting all the fabric into the different size strips for the pattern.

The next step was to start sewing the patchwork together by combining and recombing the strip[s in different arrangements.

I ended up with 20 patchwork blocks for the quilt.

It's not very elegant, but I usually put my quilt top blocks together on the floor so I can look at them from above and make changes easily. This is roughly how the baby quilt will look once they're sewn together.

Finally I stacked and numbered each row to sew together tomorrow, as it's time for me to turn into a pumpkin. Happy National Quilting Day, my friends.

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Other Stashes

Along with clearing out the spare bedroom and tidying my office and our guest bedroom, I decided to reorganize some of my stashes. This is all the yarn I have on hand, sorted by color. It looks like a lot, but lately I've been using up a minimum of half a bin every month, so this is approximately a year's supply. All of my solid color cotton perle thread. I go through a lot of this every year, too. I need a container in which I can fit all of it together, but I haven't found the right one yet. I won't show you all of my fabric -- I'm still reorganizing this stash -- but I went through everything and donated two bins of fabric I won't need to the local quilter's guild.

Downsizing

This was my fabric stash once I sorted everything -- 22 full bins. I spent a day taking out and boxing up what I could part with, with the goal of trying to reduce it by half, so I'd have 11 bins. I was very strict with myself, and removed everything that for one reason or another I was sure I wouldn't be able to use. This is what I ended up with -- 12 bins of fabric that I'm keeping. It's not quite half, but close enough. Half of what I took out went to a local quilter friend, a school and Goodwill. These four tightly-packed bins will be going to the local quilting guild once I make arrangements with them for a drop-off place. I am relieved and a little sad and now determined to control my impulses to thrift more fabric. I don't want to do this again, so until I use up six bins, I can't for any reason bring any new fabric into the house.

In Progress

I promised myself I would show you the good, bad and ugly of my cleaning this year. This is what it looks like when you dump thirty years' worth of stashed fabric on the floor -- and oy, what a pain in the butt to pick up again! This is what it looks like after it's been sorted, folded and placed in containers, which took me about a week. Now the hard part is to downsize my stash by at least half, I think (that's my goal, anyway.) I've already e-mailed the president of the local quilting guild, a local friend who is a quilter, and a public school art teacher I know to see if I can donate some of the excess to them. The rest will go to Goodwill. Already I've reduced my vintage textiles from two bins to one, and my scraps from three bins to one. It's probably the hardest clean-out I've done, which is why I saved it until last. I know I have too much fabric, more than I can use in my lifetime -- but at the same time, I love it. So I have to...

Valerean

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