A few of my favorite things

I've realized over the years that part of why I enjoy quilting so much is it feels like a jigsaw puzzle.  Sorting colors, finding the right pieces, solving a problem.  And when you are done, you don't have to take it apart and put it away in the closet.  I also love mazes. 

Looking at the stack of precuts I've been trying to use up, I noticed how many of them were white or beige.  Not fun colors for an I spy.  What could I do?  Then it hit me, a MAZE!  So I grabbed some graph paper and set to work, laying out a maze that minimized the black spaces while still being a legitimate maze (a few dead ends, etc).  I added a narrow multi-color sashing to emphasis the boundary of the puzzle.  I love how it turned out.  I may take this one to work with me.

And two more - busy busy busy

I think in the last couple of months I have made up for the last two years of limited novelty sewing.  These two tops are numbers 7 & 8 that I have made in the last 2 months.  Not quilted, but I do have a good stash of tops now.  Anyone need some baby shower gifts? 

Star Sashing

 I'm still using up those precuts.  And a stash of little left over triangles and odd scraps.  I saw the idea for this one on-line and thought I'd try it in an eye-spy.  I think I'd put this in the "eh" pile.  The stars in the sashing were sure a lot of work, and you can't really see them too well.  It's one of those times that a single color (TOT) would have worked better than the scrappy.  Ah well, lesson learned.  And those scrappy triangles are all gone now.  I found some new border fabric at Hobby Lobby in the "school teacher" section, I couldn't decide which one I liked better so used both.

X's & O's

 
One of the ladies at work recently showed me a picture of her now 8 year old daughter and the X's & O's quilt I made for her 4 years ago.  She took it to a slumber party and was very proud of it.  That got me to thinking it was a pretty fun pattern so here is another one.  I did have to pull just a few fabrics from my stash to fill out the colors, but most of this is still from those precuts.  There is still a good size stack left but most are now tans & whites which isn't too fun.  I will have to think of something else to do with them.  I spy quilts have to be colorful!

Oh and a confession.  I went to Hobby Lobby looking for border fabric, but of course there was a sale.... and yes I bought 8 other half yard cuts  -  4 great yellows, a couple of greens, some robots on black and look at these wonderful Llamas!  I can't resist llamas - my daughter loves them ever since the movie Emperor's New Groove.  So they came home with me.

I know I've said this before and done this before.  I resolve to use up some of my stash and I sew a bunch.  And then I'm feeling so good about what I've sewn that I then go shopping and restock more than I sewed.  But I've made 8 quilts in the last two months.  With only 4 additional yards of novelty I'm still ahead - or behind, which ever.  Ah well, I'm still having fun.

Time to use up precuts & scraps - or what I did over memorial day

Following my resolution to use more of my stash, I was looking at the box of 4.5" precuts.  Very few of my novelty quilts over the last few years have used these precuts.  I seem to be doing a lot more fussy cutting from my flat folds.  So I decided to see how many quilts I could make just from the box of 4.5" precuts, some of them from swaps year and years ago.

So I dumped out the box that had previously been organized by subject and sorted them instead by color.  Wow, there were A LOT of tans - I guess I haven't been using the tans as they aren't very colorful.  Gotta use some of those!.  I started putting squares on my design wall.  This first one is a Trip Around the World layout.  I haven't made this pattern in over 10 years, it was one of the first ones and one that got me started shopping for novelties by color, realizing how much of my purchases were blue or black.  I now have a very good stash of yellow, red, green, white, etc.  Anyway, in keeping with the desire to use up scraps, I used a piano key boarder made from the remnants of fussy cutting.  And 100% was from precuts, I didn't have to dive into my stash at all, even to get all the alphabet.

Trip Around the World

Gee, the stack was still huge, so let's do another.  This time I laid out the colors in a diagonal.  And the last border seemed a bit busy, so this time I used a stack of 2x2's I had left from another quilt.

Diagonal Scraps

I realized I had enough piano key borders to make a quilt entirely from them only.  I had made this pattern several years ago.  What a great way to use up all those little bits left from fussy cutting.  My friend who loves crumb quilts would love this one.