Either having a clean work area made me more productive, or having spent the entire day making it clean made me feel like I was entitled to some guilt-free playtime. Either way, I got a lot done last night and this morning.

I cut my Root of the Madder fat quarters into squares for a quilt I've been wanting to start. There isn't quite enough fabric to do the pattern as written, so I had to tinker with the numbers a bit to make the biggest quilt I can with the fabric I've got. And then I put off the cutting because I was afraid that it either wouldn't work, or I'd make a mistake, or I'd hate the way it looks once it's pieced together.

All of the pieces are cut and I've pieced enough of them together to lay out a swatch and convince myself I really am going to like this quilt.

Then I took the narrow leftover strings from the 30s disaster and squared them up and sewed them together into a long panel. The plan was to make a fabric basket or tote bag, but the more strips I sewed the more I realized that I would probably never use a bag or basket made from these particular fabrics.

So I'm going to cut my big panel into thirds and make it into Chinese coins sashed with some of my good white muslin. If it works out, it'll go to Quilts for Kids along with the kit quilts.

I've been stressing over those. I knew what the requirements were when I committed myself to this project, but I didn't realize how many of my quilts contain fabric that is either not 100% cotton or has been reclaimed from something else. Somewhere in my stash were some novelty prints I bought to make pants for the boys, but they weren't going to be quilts so I didn't have coordinating colors. It's been very easy to convince myself that I was going to have to buy new fabric.

When I was cleaning up yesterday, I found a big hunk of fish fabric. And coordinating colors. It's last owner fussy cut fish out of the middle, so I couldn't cut wof strips, but I think I made it work.



I'm not sure if there's enough green left for the back or not. I'm happy enough that I got the front out of stash.