I am furious with myself!

Last week, I cut the pieces for the cheery buzz saw quilt I've been planning (I can do that -- it's on my list!) The fabric was a bundle of fat-eights that I got on sale from Connecting Threads -- not expensive, but I really love that fabric so it was too special to mess up. I'd pulled out twenty-two of the fat eights and got all of the pieces I needed with some tiny scraps left over.

Today, I started piecing and discovered that three of my 6 1/2" squares were 6 1/4" along one side. And of course I couldn't remember where I'd put the fabric I wasn't using in the quilt, so I had to totally ransack my sewing room. But I found it!

I thought that saved the situation, but it turns out that I don't want to use those fabrics in this quilt. That's why they were put away back in the sewing room and not part of the quilt in the first place.

I can't piece scraps to make the squares I need. I could order three more fat quarters, but I'd wind up spending half as much as I spent on the sampler I started out with and buying far more fabric than I needed. Did I mention I got it on a really good sale? I could splurge and buy enough of the yellow tossed dandelions for the backing, but again, that would cost a ton.

What makes me the whole thing so darn aggravating is that I brought it on myself with one little mis-measurement.

What if I bought one yard of gorgeous yellow dandelions for the back and surrounded it with a wide border of the muslin that's left over from the front? And bought three fat quarters to make up the missing squares and used what was left from those for the binding? That'd only cost around eleven bucks...

I need to piece some blocks and see how much I really like this quilt.

More than half of the Simple Pleasures blocks are done and I've had a chance to lay them out. My concerns about this quilt are rapidly disappearing. The only one left now is how I'm going to quilt it!



As great as that is, it's left me without a leaders/enders project, which is slightly annoying. I've got a thousand or so two inch squares that need to be randomly sewn together for a quilt I fell in love with and then abandoned a couple of years ago, and the best part of using leaders and enders is that they help you slog through endless piecing like that, but I keep losing the bits I've sewn.

I'm looking for a container with a lid that'll sit next to my sewing machine and keep them together. I actually bought one at Walmart last week, but when I made it to Target without kids yesterday, I checked out their plastic storage stuff.

They had the perfect little storage thingie, with three compartments that snapped one on top of the other so I could've kept the squares in one and the pieced units in the others. It was only three-fifty.

I don't have one sitting by my sewing machine.

Because I stepped to one side to see if it came in different colors and got distracted by the flat plastic bins that are just a hair smaller than the twelve-inch square containers I use for current projects and less than half the price.



I bought half a dozen of the big plastic containers when they were on sale at Thanksgiving and thought at the time I had more than I needed. Once I realized how wrong I was, I couldn't find any more good sales on them.

These little boxes have enough room for a magazine or book and whatever else I need to keep together as long as the blocks aren't huge. I really need to go back to Target and pick up a few more -- and the neat little thing with the snap compartments -- before they get rid of the college stuff.

I've also decided that those Zip Loc Big Bags are perfect when I have to lug quilts around to use the long arm or play show and tell. Why it took me so long to figure that out, since I've been using them for yarn for ages, I don't know.

binding and binding and binding

At five-thirty this morning, the printer started running. I thought the cat had stepped on the copy button or something, but it seems to have spat out an ad for HP products all by itself.

I couldn't go back to sleep, so I slipped out of bed and headed for the dining room to cut the binding for Birds in the Air before the house got too warm to use the iron. Got that cut and pressed and some more 2 1/2" squares for Simple Pleasures cut, and no one else in the house had surfaced yet, so I decided to take the risk that the noise of my sewing machine would wake someone up.

I got the borders machine sewn onto the bird quilt, AND the teapot quilt, AND Dot to Dot before Quinn finally bounded out into the kitchen a few minutes after nine, followed by the rest of them. That was my quilting goal for the entire day!

Dot to Dot and the teapot quilt have been sitting quilted but unbound for months because I couldn't figure out which fabric to use. Then, a couple of days ago, I went up to the sewing room to get backing for my rail fence and absolutely perfect fabric choices, fabrics that won't work in anything else I'm doing or plan on doing, were staring right at me.





I've got so much binding to hand stitch! And it just hit me yesterday that every quilt on that looooong list of WIPs is going to go into this same pile. Judy sent me a great link to a tutorial for doing it by machine, but my last attempt at that was such a disaster I'm not trying again until I have a quilt I'm willing to take chances with. In the meantime, I'm telling myself that a stack of quilts ready for the hand stitching is better than a stack of quilts waiting for me to cut and machine stitch the bindings so I can get to the hand stitching.

Dad has always been tremendously supportive of Mom's hobbies and mine. He's the one who bought my Janome as a Christmas present when I already had a working machine packed away someplace.

Yesterday, he went above and beyond by offering to take all four kids -- including the four year old who has been an absolute screaming terror for the past couple of weeks -- to the park so that I could quilt Birds in the Air. It's the first time he's taken all of them anywhere, so I had my fingers crossed that they wouldn't drive him nuts before I could get the quilt done.

On a good day, they'd all play happily and my daughter would keep the little ones corralled and they'd just need an adult there because kids can't play at the park alone. It hadn't started out as a good day, so I wasn't optimistic.

But Grandpa did it! I hear there was one tantrum, but he survived it.



It is SO much easier to get good results without a preschooler wrapped around each ankle. I always had a hunch that it would be, but this was my first chance to actually try it.

Birds in the Air is one of the tops that I've been hesitant to quilt because I was afraid to ruin it. I've been waiting until I got more practice, but while I wait the pile of "too good to learn on" quilts grows...

I'm so glad I took the plunge with this one. The quilting is exactly what I wanted it to be, better than the triangles or the applique!

I know exactly which quilt I want to throw on the long arm next, but it's going to be at least a couple of weeks before Mom's schedule and mine mesh again. While I wait, I've got the rail fence (another "too good" top) pin basted and ready for another attempt at meandering on the Janome. I'm getting a little better at that.

I've tackled the list! Two sides of the Weed Whacker are sewn down. I got the background of the little chicken wall hanging pieced and the bits of wool felt cut out. I also got the baby cat quilt finished --- not as nicely as I'd hoped, but it's done. I'm not sure if done really is better than perfect in this case, but I'm not trying to pick out the quilting and redo it.



I was going to start quilting Layered Squares the other night when I went over to keep a friend company while she started a new project, but it turned out that the yellow and white gingham I'd planned on using was really nasty. I don't know if I'd never looked at it closely, or if I'd hated the quilt so much I didn't care how bad the fabric was, but when I finally got ready to pin, I couldn't make myself do it. So my friend and I went shopping and now I've got a very nice purple and white print to use.

And I've got a date with the long arm later this week -- hopefully Birds in the Air will be ready for binding soon!

mustn't start anything new....mustn't start anything new...mustn't start anything new....

That's the mantra over at Stashbusters these days, and although I'm not sure I agree with it, it might just be possible that I should come up with my own variation. While Bill was in Safeway picking up some stuff for dinner and I was stuck in the car with the kids (because sometimes it really is much faster to do it that way than for all of us to go in and trek through the store)I made a list of my WIPs. Not UFOs, projects that I'm really working on and expect to finish. Just the ones that I could list without really thinking too hard.

There are twenty five of them.

That might actually be a lot.

Weed Whacker -- needs binding sewn down

Bento Box -- blocks need to be sewn into a top

Simple Pleasures -- lots of piecing left to do - but the snowballs are done!

Lover's Knot -- 250 blocks left to piece

Courthouse Steps -- I've been cutting strips, but not started piecing

Chicken Kit -- gotta make sure there's enough wool

Bagsket

Dino Quilt -- need to piece back and quilt

Cat Baby Quilt -- need to quilt and bind

rail fence -- need to quilt

layered squares -- need to quilt

red quilt -- finish last six blocks and assemble

scrappy cats -- more blocks to piece

lattice strippy -- 13 more blocks

cat bed -- quilt and figure out zipper

flower baskets -- lots of applique

A's Scrappy Mountains Majesty -- sew down binding

my own Scrappy Mountains Majesty -- quilt

Dot to Dot -- choose fabric for binding

Tea Pots -- choose fabric for binding

Leif's Snails -- quilt

Cheery Buzzsaws

Glittering Gems -- quilt

Blue Bargello -- Quilt

Birds in the Air -- Quilt

North Pacific

And, as if that wasn't bad enough, there's another list of projects I can't wait to start, which I probably can scrounge up the fabric for. (Aren't scrappy quilts wonderful!)I might feel guiltier if I hadn't just finished three other projects.

So my thought is that if I try to finish at least one project from the list each week (based on my husband's weekly work schedule, not the actual calendar that the rest of the world follows), I can start new things from my stash without guilt.

Even keeping it up for ten weeks would make a huge dent in the list. Not counting whatever new projects I add while I'm at it!

Although I love the way that snowball blocks look in finished quilts, I'm not all that excited about piecing them. My latest pet project needed eighty.

Eighty is a lot of something you don't really want to piece. The corners snag on my quarter inch foot. But if I use the foot that doesn't snag, I can't alternate the corners with other things. But, as of tonight, I don't have to worry about that until I decide to make another quilt with snowballs.

Because my eighty blocks are done. Now I've got to piece together about seven hundred little 2 1/2" squares to make the sashing that goes between the snowballs. Sound like excellent leaders and enders to anyone else?

I laid a few out to see if it was really going to look anything like I had pictured in my mind. Controlled scrappy quilts still make me a bit nervous, especially when I have firm ideas about how I want them to turn out.

I think I've got what I wanted --



And I know I've got what I wanted here --



Last night, I cut the last of the fabric for my Bento Box and got the lights and darks paired together. Tonight, I sewed the last twenty blocks. And, given my recent track record, I had to lay them all out to reassure myself that I'd counted right and that I really did have all sixty-four.

I'm torn between the urge to assemble the top right now and getting it quilted as soon as humanly possible and my reluctance to sew the blocks together because then the layout will be permanent and there's no more shifting things around. I'm also not sure what I want to back it with. Unlike most of my other quilts, this one is mostly quilt shop fabric. Maybe I should try to find some nice (and affordable) fabric for the back.