A weekend of challenges

This was definitely a challenging weekend.  I challenged myself to finish a baby quilt, and I sorta lived up to that…more to come.  And, after baking a small ham and making a huge pan of scalloped potatoes and a couple of gallons of chicken tortilla soup and a spice cake, we found out the hot water heater was out and wouldn’t re-light and I ended up having to boil water to do dishes. 

And, take a sink bath this morning.

That sucked.

Anyway, one of the things that’s been on my mind is my stash, and the challenges of having a large stash and how to use it.  Rebecca called it my textile vocabulary and I’ve really been thinking about that a lot.  And, it’s made me feel better about my “good” stash and like I can actually deal with that and the size of it.  I use a lot of words.  I use a lot of fabric.  I am verbose in every way.

But, there are other parts of stash that are a little harder to swallow.  I needed some adjustment to my stash users system and some good patterns to follow that use easy to cut strips.

I sat down with an unsorted bin of scraps this weekend.  There are three.  And, that doesn’t include the sorted things.  What I need is to sort my stash by color so I can use it.  I had some scraps sorted that way in a 6 drawer cabinet (six drawers, six colors in the basic color wheel), so decided to add to that.  I emptied my first bin of scraps and started on the second one this weekend.  Sorting into pre-cut sizes and into colors.  And, to celebrate, I decided to cut a quilt out of it. 

I decided to use a pattern out of Cathy Wierzbicki’s book Twosey-Foursey Quilts.  All these patterns use either 2 1/2” strips or 4 1/2” strips.  The pattern I picked is called Barbed Wire.

It took a couple of tries.

But, then I got the pattern to emerge from the scraps.  Like so many scrap quilts, no place for mediums.  It was lights and darks.

So, there’s a Linus quilt in the making.  It’s also meant to get me back in the Leaders and Enders process.  I let myself get out of the habit when my last project got too big to use as a leader/ender.  So, I’ve been piecing for a few months, using disposable pieces of fabric to lead and end.

The baby quilt looks great.  Look at all that wonderful flowing quilting.

Except for the hump.

Wish me luck, I shall endeavor to conquer baby quilt mountain. 

But, honestly, that thing ain’t never gonna lay flat.  It’s over quilted in some areas and underquilted in others.  There is no fix for that.  Oh, I could block it out without having to do any more work.  But, who wants to give a new Mom a quilt that needs blocking?  Doesn’t seem fair. 

Everybody have a great Monday.

Lane