Stripping...

I've been cutting my leftover fabrics into strips for the last year or so and had accumulated quite a collection of them. I've made a few quilts with them...a couple of log cabins, some heartstrings blocks, nine patch quilts, but the boxes never seemed to empty, no matter how many I used. I would look at them and feel guilty that I had them all neatly cut and rarely used them. I did think about using up bunches of them in Bonnie's Orange Crush quilt, but I haven't found the time to work on it. So there they sat...until tonight.

This morning at school, the art teacher came to me and said, "You're a quilter. Would you have any scraps that you'd like to donate to the art classes? We make puppets and the fabric I have has been rooted through for so many years, I just can't look at it again. What I really need is strips of fabric, we use them for the arms of the puppets..." Strips? Did she say STRIPS? Of course I have strips. So the bags above are going to the art teacher tomorrow....and my strip bins are EMPTY!!!!

I don't know how many yards of fabric are in there, but all of them have been used in one quilt or another over the years and it's nice to see them going to a good home. AND THEY'RE OUT OF MY SEWING ROOM!!! Of course, I did manage to make room for a few new fabrics in the last week. The fabrics below are from my stash and have been paired with the new fairy fabric from Michael Miller. These will become a quilt for a special little girl.

And these are....just because I loved them when I stopped in The Little Shop a few weeks ago. I have no idea what they'll become.

Judy was having a Quiltathon today and I got to play a little bit. I spent several hours quilting on a customer quilt. I'm quilting an all over feather design and today was one of those days where I got "in the zone" and it felt good to quilt. Until my back started to hurt. So I went upstairs and sewed the binding on the front of the second graduation quilt. The handsewing will be done over the weekend since it's going to be hot and humid here for the next few days...I'll be sitting under an air conditioning vent while I sew!

Wow, two posts in the same week...my mom is going to be happy! :o)

One Top Done...

And one more to go. Of course I didn't have enough of anything for a border, so I decided to do a piano key border and use up some orphan strips. You'd think there would be some room in my scrap strip boxes now, wouldn't you? Nope...didn't make a dent and they're still packed in there! This was fun to put together!

Stripping...

I've been wanting to start a new project, knew I wanted to make it scrappy, but I'm so tired of working with the Thimbleberries strips that I cut last summer. After all, I've made two quilts out of them and have been using them in my Heartstrings blocks. But the colors are so boring....

Yesterday it occurred to me that Judy said we should pull a fabric from our stash and make something out of it for February...so why couldn't I pull a whole bunch and make my scrappy quilt more interesting and...fun! So, I spent last night and this afternoon ironing lots of old (very old!) fat quarters and cutting them into strips. I've decided to make a log cabin quilt for my bed for the summer. I don't expect it to be done at the end of February, but since I'm pulling lots of fabrics from my stash I figure I can take a little longer. The centers will be red and the logs will be all sorts of colors. While I'm cutting, I'm also cutting some strips larger than the 1.5" strips I need so that I can add them to the strips for my Heartstrings blocks to make those sing a little too!

So my bins are filling up...can't wait to get started!