staying home

Today is the first day in far too long that I've been able to just stay home and play with fabric. I actually got to use my newest Go! cutter die.

If the only thing I ever did with my Accuquilt Go was cut 2 1/2" triangles with the bonus die that came with the cutter, I think I'd still love this thing. There are a lot of projects I want to tackle that use triangles. But there are a lot of other dies I want to add to my stash.

The ones that were my top three choices when I was entering some of those Accuquilt giveaways have scooted down the list to make room for others.

The isosceles triangle? It makes kaleidoscope blocks, which is what I did today --



I posted last month about how desperately I want a Drunkard's Path die. Then I saw what I could do with a triangle in a square and I couldn't decide which one I wanted more.

I'd settled on the triangle in a square, then was browsing on Amazon and saw that the price for the Drunkard's Path die dropped to $29.99...and I had to make up my mind all over again. First to decide which die I wanted most, then whether I should wait a few more days for my latest two gift certificates from Swagbucks to post to my account, or if I should just pay cash and not gamble that the price wouldn't jump back up. I did wait, and the die wound up costing me fifteen dollars or so of real money and $20 worth of gift certificates I earned by indulging my children's' curiosity. Which works for me!

Over the past couple of weeks, I've had a few brief and scattered chances to quilt.

I was looking for yardage to back a quilt and stumbled across a box of cut pieces I'd stashed up there months ago. I knew that I had those pieces, but I thought they were all diamonds. The top layer is diamonds. Then there's a layer of squares. And at the bottom is a layer of Drunkard's Path pieces.

The fabric is seriously weird -- I'm not even going to guess what it was intended for. Too thick for clothing, too think for upholstery, definitely synthetic. Definitely old. It'll make great animal shelter quilts. So I'm practicing piecing curves without pins while I wait for my die to be delivered.

Whoever cut them out was even less concerned about accuracy than I am, so it's a little hard to tell how I'm doing.

I pieced some of the diamonds into a cat quilt, which was anything but flat until I stippled it into submission.



And I got that backing I was looking for into a quilt that just needs me to stitch down the binding. I'm going to work on that tonight. And tomorrow I'm staying home again.