Get the camera!

"Mom, come outside quick! Dad wants the camera and both boys...."

There's a certain tone of voice that means whatever it is is alive and going to get away if I'm not quick. And it's not the hushed urgency that means it's a bunch of deer up on the hill...




Honestly, I was expecting something bigger. This guy isn't nearly the size of the last one. (The one I almost stepped on one afternoon when I walked around the back of the van to get the groceries out, that Bill keeps a picture of in his toolbox at work because it was a good six feet long and very scary looking.)

Would it be too mean to send some pictures to the grandmas without mentioning that it's our own backyard?

Today's inspiration --

mamacjt is making darling little quilts for DQS8 and has some great posts showing her original sketches and how they transformed into finish quilts.

I've finally managed to change from my darning foot to my 1/4 inch foo and raise the feed dogs, and pieced about a dozen 2 1/2" squares together. Doesn't sound like much, but it's more than I've done in weeks. And the quilters over at 15 minutes play are getting all sorts of stuff done in little snippets of time. (Don't tell me if they're actually spending longer, I don't want to know!)

drooling over play kitchens

I have little boys. I have little boys who like to play with big boy toys. I do not need a play kitchen.

When I had a littl(er) girl, we went through two of the mass produced plastic play kitchens and a ton of plastic play food and no one ever really embraced any of it.

I do not need a play kitchen...

But I seriously wantone, now that I've seen what people are doing with old furniture from garage sales. Like the first one I saw and fell in love with. Or this little sink that used to be a night stand. Or this one.

Like soooo many other things, I wish I'd seen things like this when my little ones were littler....when I had more room to justify things like this....when I had more energy to attempt things like this (but less money to spend on the supplies, so I suppose that part evens out)...

But, while lusting after all of these fabulous play kitchens (I'm too old to make one for myself, right?), an idea started to form. An idea that would be perfect for my little guys if I can work out the logistics.

still not quilting

If anyone wants proof that all is not right in my house, they can look at my sewing machine where the same quilt has been pinned down by the needle for ten days.

Ten days ago, I spent a whole twenty minutes trying to finish quilting the spirals. Before that, the little quilt sat untouched for a month.

The pile of unfolded laundry and the floor that need vacuuming, those aren't that unusual. It's not even unusual for me to leave a quilt neglected for that long.

What is wrong, and is slowly driving me toward madness, is that I haven't been working on anything else. I'm not sure how long that green lace baby hat has been on my size eight circulars waiting to be cast off. I don't want to know.

I keep thinking I'll be able to piece some nine patches or cut a binding, or do just a little bit of something, but my knee hurts and my shoulder hurts and by the time I've got the kids fed and the dishes done, I haven't got enough oomph left to even think about taking that quilt out of the sewing machine or raising the feed dogs and changing the presser foot.

Which takes two minutes. And isn't that physically strenuous. But considering how many typos I've had to fix so far while typing this, maybe I shouldn't play with sharp things. I cut through the back of my fingernail with a paring knife while slicing tomatoes the other day. And then slammed the same bandaged finger in the porch door an hour later.

And no, that wasn't when I was taking any of the painkillers. I'm apparantly that rattled and klutzy all on my own.

While I'm resting my knee and shoulder between doing things that have to be done, I've been following rabbit trails from blog to blog. Not quilting or knitting blogs, because seeing quilts I want to make and knowing I can't start them is just depressing.... but I can read neat vintage and craft blogs and get excited about "someday" projects.

Jan at Bobbypins Boardwalk has a great idea for organizing fabric on a slatted folding door. Now I really want a door to play with.

I'm really looking forward to a series of drafting that's coming up over at ikat bag

And look at the felt doctor's kit over here. Isn't that just the coolest thing ever?! My two little guys would definitely play with the xray and cast. I'm thinking one of the felt playhouses with a doctor's office would be fun. Not that I'd be that ambitious even if I was at my best...

Happy Hour!

Happy Hour has got to be one of the best ideas Craft Warehouse has ever come up with, even better than Black Friday sales because you don't have to decide between cheap toys for the kids and cheap toys for Mom. Every Wednesday night, from six to eight, they've got coupons for 40% off one item and 20% off the rest of your purchase.

I'm sure those hours work for lots of other people, but last night was one of the very few times I've actually been up in town at the right time and haven't had to rush straight home after running errands. So I stopped early in the day to make sure they had coupons and see if they had anything I wanted to come back for.

They had quilting fabric on clearance for $1.99 a yard. Bright colors for the baby quilts.... Dark civil war colors for my quilts.... Moda... I spent the next three hours trying to figure out how I was going to wrangle two preschoolers and a ten year old, because the last time I made it to Happy Hour the place was really busy.

Last night, there was only one other woman buying fabric. A couple of others were looking, but seemed immune to the cheap prices and pretty colors. Everything I'd seen earlier in the day was still right there waiting for me, so I filled the cart with bolts and left my thirteen year old to get it cut and took the boys outside.

How can it take an hour to cut fabric? I can understand a long wait in line, but that was just to cut what I was buying and write down the numbers from the ends of the bolts and get out the White Out and re-write the numbers again.... And then it was another half hour or so to pay for it.

Have I mentioned how much I appreciate my thirteen year old? She decided that standing in line by herself would be much more pleasant than standing in line with me and three boys, so I took them out to the van and put on a movie and rested my knee while she spent my money for me.

Fourteen yards of yummy fabric and two nice tote bags for for twenty-six bucks. I'm SO happy to have stumbled across that sale rack! There are a couple of pink prints I didn't pick up that are still haunting me (in hindsight, I really really really wish I'd bought the whole bolt to use as a backing!), but there aren't any "why did I buy that's" that made it home, so I did good.

AND, as if that wasn't enough quilty goodness to bring home, I picked up two huge bags of cotton fabric that I'd seen on Craig's List and had Grandma swing by and check out for me. For twenty bucks, I got a whole ton of backs and bindings to be.

What I need now is the ability to quilt.

My old farmhouse kitchen needs a Mason Jar soap dispenser. I've even got the jars for it.

flashing the thread stash

Inspired by the Show Us Your Stash thread over at Sew Mama Sew, here's my thread stash --



This is all of it. I was trying to hold off on placing another Connecting Threads order until I hit my last spool of off-white. Not counting the one in the machine now, I've got two left, so I guess I'm about due.

How did you select colors for your personal thread collection?

Most are neutrals -- or would be if I wasn't running so low. Some came in a sampler with the Janome. Some I bought because I thought I'd use them in a future project. And some I just loved the colors.

Do you always match the color perfectly to your project?

No. I usually piece with a neutral color, either cream or beige depending on my mood. Lately, I've been trying to use up the thread that came as a bonus with my sewing machine and I'm using whatever color I think I can possibly get away with.

Do you ever use contrasting thread?

Now and then.

Do you use the same color in the bobbin as the upper thread?

Usually, unless I'm trying to use up some extra bobbins.

What if a fabric has big areas of very different colors?

I'd probably use a neutral color and not worry about it. But most of my quilts are lots of itty bitty scrappy pieces, so I haven't had to make that decision often.

Do you ever buy thread because you fall in love with the color (without a particular project in mind)?

Yes, especially if it's on sale. I try to control myself, because I can only spend so much on thread at one time (because it's never just thread that I need!)

Do you “invest” in thread?

I stockpile thread because we live here in the middle of nowhere and I like knowing that I have plenty and won't use up my last bit of something important when my husband is at work with all of the car seats or it's three in the morning or I won't be making the trip to town for another week.

I'm trying to use up some of the oddball thread and replace it with colors from Connecting Threads. Because I love their thread and it fits so nicely in my old treadle sewing machine drawers.

What types of thread do you have? (elastic, quilting, all-purpose, wool, etc.)

Most of my thread is 50 weight cotton, except for a couple of spools of hand quilting thread that I bought when it was on sale and I thought I'd use it. Now I'm thinking maybe I could use it up sewing down bindings.

fabulous accomodations

Bonnie posted a gorgeous picture of where she was staying in Sisters. So did Lori and Spicewood Quilting Diva, and I'm sure there must be lots of others. With every hotel room and campsite in that part of the state booked months and months in advance, there just have to be!

So I decided to share a picture of my own fabulous accommodations from Friday night, carefully staged not to include the two inflatable mattresses and four sleeping bags my children were using.



I called dibs on that concrete floor last year right after my parents told us they'd bought property in La Pine. (The cot was an unexpected bonus and meant I didn't have to share an inflatable mattress with my two preschoolers.) Dad offered to take all three of the boys with him for the day.

Which made it my first quilt show without the kids, about a decade before I expected it to happen. I was not staying home.

The quilt show was a totally different experience from my rented wheelchair. (It probably also helped that I wasn't chasing three little boys in three different directions.)



I couldn't read the tags without getting up and walking over to them, so I missed out on the "read the tags on every quilt that caught my fancy" chunk of the kidless quilt show fantasy. To my surprise, I was able to see the quilting on most of the quilts.

This is the one that's haunting me today --



I want it! Or my own version of it, which would be more of a throw size, with 1" finished squares and slightly different log cabins... I'd be cutting pieces today if it wasn't so hot and if I was able to quilt.

What's this one? I thought it was fifty-four forty or fight, but I looked up that block when we got home and this is something else.Whatever it was, there were a bunch of them this year.



I'm glad I went and I'm brimming with ideas, but today I'm exhausted.

I need a clothesline.

I've been saying that for about twelve years now, but at times like this, I really wish I had a clothesline so I show off my new fabric in style. Fourteen men's shirts that I think I spent a grand total of four bucks on. Three or four came from a free box at what was otherwise the lamest yard sale ever, and the rest came from a sale at the local thrift shop's storage unit where they sell clothes three for a dollar.

They'll be an absolutely great start for a quilt I've been wanting to make. I just don't know when.

At my last appointment, the doctor said to stop trying to quilt for a while. Not what I wanted to hear, especially since it's been a couple of weeks since I even tried to quilt. I've been patient -- now I want my life back!

I thought I'd take the boys to McDonald's this afternoon to burn off some energy in their playland. How mobile do you have to be to sit on a chair and sip diet Coke and keep two preschoolers from escaping through the one door? More than I am, apparently.

Halfway Through the Year

Because I saw someone else post June totals and thought it would be a neat idea, and because I fear I'm at an actual stopping point here, I decided to scan through my blog posts and figure out my own progress for the year.

In 2009, I made twenty quilts. I gave seven of them away, but that still leaves thirteen quilts and since I hope to be quilting for many many more years...

The math concerned me a bit. Especially since I've got this bad habit of looking at a pattern in a magazine and thinking "That might be fun!" closely followed by "I think I've got scraps that would work for that." Which left me with tops I wasn't that wild about.

This year I'm saving those blocks that might be fun for the baby quilts. I've made (I think) thirty so far. They're fun, there's no pressure because I'm not going to have to live with them for the rest of my life, and because I know they're not staying here, I don't use up my last bits of some precious print in them and then decide I don't like the quilt but I can't part with the fabric.



I've made three quilts for myself so far and I'm attached to them all. Madder Snowballs used a fabric line from Connecting Threads that I absolutely loved. Sawtooth Chain was my birthday present to myself. And Courthouse Steps was a pattern I'd wanted to try ever since I finished the log cabin twins.



I worked up my courage and started quilting bigger quilts on my own machine. Sparkling Gems, Fun With Bricks, and my log cabin twin all got finished without a trip up to use the long arm.



Not sure what's next -- I think I'll try to finish the blocks for Grandma's Donuts and the nine patches for By the Lake. And there are those Jelly Roll wanna-bes and Quinn's green quilt, but I've got to work up a lot more energy before I tackle anything new.

free by the side of the road

I have the absolute best best fried. Yesterday, she met us down by the river and chased after my youngest two while I sat and babied my knee. Even with my older two helping, there's no way I could've kept up with the toys that the little two kept deliberately floating downstream and still been able to walk back up to the car and drive home at the end of the day.

All four of the kids were so worn out that they actually went to bed at a decent hour and stayed there. Not that I got to enjoy it, because I fell asleep on the couch a couple of hours later while trying to watch a movie.

On the way home from the river, we passed a neighbor's house and I had to do an immediate U-turn to see if I'd really seen what I thought I saw.

It was. A vintage (I'm guessing 60s) kitchen set with a table and four chairs. And my eyes hadn't played a trick, it really was child size. Needed serious TLC, but you don't find things like that often, especially not with free signs on them.

I don't have time to refinish furniture. Even if I did, I don't have a need for or a place to put a wonderful little vintage kitchen set. But I do have a good friend who might.

Sadly, in the five minutes or so it took me to call her and her to get here, someone else snagged them. Next time I'm going to have the brains to call from my cell phone and leave my daughter sitting on them. (To add insult to injury, they only took the chairs. I'd asked if I could have just the chairs, but the neighbor didn't want to see the set broken up, which I totally agreed with. Apparently the next people to drive by didn't.)

I can't find anything like it online, but it was a similar style to this full size one.

What I did come home with was this -





At the time, I had no idea what it actually was, just that I wanted it for my old farmhouse and that since it had "Westinghouse" embossed on the front it probably had some kitchen purpose in its past. Turns out it's a cabinet stand for a 1950s Westinghouse roaster.

Never mind that I don't have a roaster to need a cabinet for, I'm going to clean it up and either use it for towels in the bathroom or cookbooks in the kitchen.

And I did not hide it. It was sitting right on the porch for Bill to see when he got home. There's an interesting post about Secret Dealings over on the Curious Quilter this afternoon. While my fabric dealings aren't exactly secret, I try not to draw too much attention to them.

adjusting my goals

This is how a lot of my UFOs happen. I'm going along happy as a clam and getting lots of things done and starting lots more things and then something pulls me away from the quilting and knitting and by the time I can do either again, I've totally forgotten what I was doing in the first place.

Usually, it's a vacation or a holiday or sometimes a disaster, but the end is usually in sight. This time... Well, I've got to be doing better by the second Saturday in July because my father plans on taking all three boys for the day and attending the Sisters quilt show without kids in tow is a dream I thought I'd have to wait at least another decade to fulfill. If I can't comfortably walk around all day...well I'm going to be optimistic and do everything I can to make sure I do get to go.

As for the UFOs, I think the best thing is to make a list of what I was working on so I remember what I'm so anxious to get back to doing!

Why can't these things happen ever when the dishes and laundry are all caught up and the shopping has just been done? But I suppose if they did happen then, the laundry and dishes wouldn't last. And if I'd done my shopping earlier in the day, I would've had groceries piled between the rose bushes with my car seats and everything else.

We finally got the van back. It took them three tries to get the bumpers to match the rest of the car. And I'm crossing my fingers and praying that they got the mechanical stuff right.

Having the van back meant I could go grocery shopping yesterday, two and a half weeks past the point where I really needed to do it. (Bill has been running to the store for me, but as much as I don't like grocery shopping with four kids, not being able to do it is worse.) On the way, we stopped at the quilt shop that I've been trying to get to for the past month.

I found some great greens for the quilt I'm going to make Quinn, and a couple of pinks that will work for a quilt of my own because the fat quarters are a dollar each if you buy them in multiples of five. I'm not totally sure if it's "quilt shop quality," but the price was right and it'll do.



The books were half off, so I picked up Eleanor Burns' new one. Ages ago, I fell in love with a barn pattern and searched out just the right reds. Now I'm thinking I might like these barns better. And the price was right. Now I've just got to figure out if I have (or can borrow from Mom or can manage without) the rulers I'll need.

When I'll do that, I don't know, because since our trip to Walmart I've barely been limping from one end of our little house to the other. Have you ever counted how many times you have to go from one end of the house to the other just to keep up with four kids?

Mom loaned me her darning foot and, although I've only been able to try a couple of spirals, it doesn't seem to have made any difference in the jackhammer sound of my machine.

sigh

I think I'd feel better about not quilting if I knew the machine was ready and waiting for me.

I do have this --



and this --



both from Mom, who knew how much I've been wanting to get my hands on a jelly roll and cut them herself from her own stash. The pinks are going to be (I hope) Hugs and Kisses. The other one, I'm not so sure about. I'm debating either trying Avignon Picnic or one of the patterns from the two Jelly Roll books I've got from the library. Same things I was trying to decide with those Moda scrap bags, but now I've got more fabric to play with.

I fixed it!

My little yellow and white quilt top has been taken apart and put back together, this time with the right shade of white for the plain blocks. It looks much better, especially now that it's quilted and has the binding almost on.

The whole point of this quilt was to use up the cute old Raggedy Ann and Andy fabric I found at that rummage sale.



I've still got enough left for a second quilt, and a third pieced backing, but I'm going to wait until I've got the right fronts to go with them.

That's the good news. The bad news is that the Janome still sounds like a jackhammer when I try to free motion quilt. I've been piecing for weeks without the slightest problem, but it gets ornery when I try to quilt.

I've googled, but there aren't any obvious search terms that will get me what I want. I've asked on my favorite quilting list, and the best suggestion there is that I'm trying to move the fabric too fast and moving the needle out of position.

Maybe that's it. It does sound better if I concentrate and force myself to move the fabric really really slowly...but it's always worked before now. Unless the pain in my shoulders has me doing things differently without realizing it.

I've got a stack of new baby quilt tops and want to get them done. So I cross hatched one and stitched one in the ditch and I strongly prefer the ones with loops and spirals. So I thought I could quilt ten or twenty minutes at a time this afternoon as a break from gutting the pantry.

Because I've got to completely empty the room to make space for Bill to install my exciting new toy. It will just barely fit where the wooden shelves are now. I'll have to wiggle in past the furnace to get at it, but the promise of having all of the cans out of my awful kitchen drawers makes that seem like a small sacrifice.

I'm always trying to stock up on extra stuff "in case of," but a combination of the most poorly designed kitchen cabinets (I don't even have cabinets, I have drawers that won't open or close when they're full) ever and two preschoolers who refuse to be convinced that cans are not building blocks has been driving me slowly crazy. I think this might be the answer.

Ever noticed how many of the answers to your problems are at Costco?

Learning Something New

I've heard that razor blades are good for ripping out long seams, but I never had the motivation to try it myself until today when I saw my little yellow and white quilt top in good light.

The white I used for the solid blocks is nowhere near the same color as the white I used for the nine patch blocks. If I'd cut all of the pieces from the same sheet, it would have been fine. If I'd cut them from any other combination of sheets, it would have been fine. Only one hunk of fabric was blindingly white, and of course I don't have enough of it left to cut the solid blocks.

I was tempted to toss the whole thing and start over, but the yellow fabric is good stuff and right now I'm stubborn enough to take the whole thing apart. Because, unlike the van and my sore shoulder and a laundry list of other stupid things, I can FIX this all by myself.

Recently, I stumbled across the Feeling Stitchy blog and the more fantastic embroidery I see there, the more I want to try some myself. Did you know that you can embroider on the pages of old books? I found a tutorial. And you've got to go look at this and this. How someone would even come up with the idea, let alone have the patience to pull it off... I really wish there was more explanation to go with it. They look hand stitched, but WOW.

quilting helps

I knew that some quilting time would help my mood, but knowing something will work is easier than finding the time and enthusiasm to actually do it.

This afternoon I still didn't feel like it, but I made myself finish the last three rounds (I suppose they're actually borders, but I don't like borders and if it was a shawl, they'd be rounds) of the new blue baby quilt --



And I decided to see what these 8 1/2" blocks would look like set on point, which required making eighteen of them so I'd have something to to set.



I really do like them this way, and it didn't take that much longer than setting them in straight rows.

Now I'm piecing blocks for another idea I thought up while digging through 2 1/2" squares for those blocks, and another planned for after that...

stuck at home with my stash

A week later, and I'm still not back on track. I've sorted through some fabric and cut some new 2 1/2" squares, but getting the van fixed seems to have become my full time job. And I still hurt. So I'm still cranky.

One bright spot in my week was an email from CSNstores.com offering to send me an item to review. They've got two hundred online stores and sell all sorts of things, from lighting (Alex thinks we should get a solar disco ball), to toys, to housewares.

I've spent some time browsing their sites and found tons of possibilities. I could get a fancy new iron to replace my defective cheapie one, or a quilt rack (they've got several gorgeous ones to choose from), or some cherry red Le Creuset stoneware to go with our cast iron.

And it looks like I'll be able to do a giveaway in a couple of months, so I'll be able to share the fun with one of my readers.

how things fit together

I've spent the past two days puzzling about how events fit together and how if we hadn't taken that hawk up to Salem on Monday I wouldn't have taken the van in for an alignment later that afternoon and wouldn't have solid proof that the radiator was really damaged in the accident two days later... but if I was going to have that much luck, why couldn't we have been somewhere else and avoided the accident completely? Or maybe my luck was that the boys were all sitting up straight with their seat belts in the right position and Mommy and Grandma were the only ones hurt when we got rear ended hard enough to push us into two other stopped cars?

My week is not going well.

Before things went to hell, I did stop at a rummage sale at the church down the road, hoping to find some cheap cotton shirts to cut up. I never made it to the clothing, because I found this yardage, which will be perfect backing for the baby quilts.



And they had boxes and boxes of quilting magazines for a quarter a piece. I got big stack of old Quiltmakers that I know I didn't have and some Traditional Quiltworks, which is one of my favorite of the older quilting magazines. Then they changed the price to a dime -- I would've gone back and picked out a bunch more, but I was running late and thought I could go back the next day. Could have, too, if I had a car and wasn't on pain meds.

Did I mention that I'm cranky?

As much as I want to finish Grandma's Donuts, I don't want to work on it while I'm dealing with the rest of this. So I'm starting something new.

When I was cutting the sheet into background squares, I made some mistakes that left me with long pieces the wrong size. Perfect to cut into 2 1/2" strips for another baby quilt like this one --



I've been curious to try it with the white and pieced strips reversed, to see if it would be any easier to put together that way. Pretty sure it won't, but it's a way to convince myself I'm not making the same exact quilt twice. I've got a couple of other variations in mind, too.

This is the first time I've mixed truly solid scraps in with the prints. I thought they'd stick out like a sore thumb, but they blended in just fine.



I think I've got two more white borders and a pieced border to do on this top. Then I've got yellow fabric pulled to make a simple Irish chain to back with the Raggedy Ann fabric, and I want to try setting some of those framed squares on point.

Nothing can be dealt with until Monday, so I might as well play.

Bill found an injured hawk lying in the highway yesterday, so we made a very frantic run up to town to deliver her to the raptor rehab lady. The poor little girl had fallen out of her nest and had a head injury. (And I'm sure it didn't help when a stupid woman pulled onto the highway directly in front of us and I had to stomp on the brakes, which jostled all of us.)

I thought about taking a picture, but was so afraid that she wouldn't make it to town that I convinced myself photographing a dying bird would be just too morbid. But after handing her over and hearing that she appeared to be in good shape except for the head trauma, I'm wishing I had. She was gorgeous.

And since we were up there already, we got the van aligned and went to visit the grandparents and stopped at the library and by the time we got home again I did not feel like working on the donuts.

I'm not sure that I ever do feel like working on the donuts unless it's 3am and I'm lying awake in bed, or I'm far from the sewing machine. Last night I didn't feel like doing much of anything, so I set the kitchen timer for an hour and made myself piece wedges. I got my ten blocks done. And seven more this morning.

Twenty nine more to go. I can do this.

I ran out of the white sheet I was using for the background, so I had to cut into another one. It amazes me how fast I go through this stuff. With that last barn sale find, I've got fifty plus yards of white cotton, but I don't expect it to last long.

Progress!

It's actually starting to look like something. By the time I'm done, I'll have twenty of the large circles -- what happened to my not making bed sized quilts?

Now that all of my fabric choices are made, I'm wondering if I should've left the new ones out. I don't think any of them are glaringly different from the scrap bag fabrics, but it could have been all vintage...

not an example of heirloom machine quilting

Eleven more blocks pieced and appliqued, forty-six more to go...

My fingertips are a little singed, my template I made out of "no-melt mylar" is bubbled and warped almost beyond recognition, and I'm at that stressed point where I know that this quilt should come together more-or-less okay, but I don't yet have the faith that it'll actually happen.

If I do ten blocks a day, I can have them all done in eight days. I can do that! At the very least, I can get all of the quarter circles pieced so I don't walk around worrying about whether or not I cut enough wedges. (I definitely did cut enough wedges, but some might have wandered off and that's the possibility that I don't like.)

I can keep going and get it done, or I can set it aside to work on something else. I really want to see what all of these blocks look like together. I want to see what it looks like when it's quilted (although I haven't tried free motion quilting since last time, when the machine made a jackhammer sound with every stitch and that's another thing to stress over!)

In between finger singing and slow zig zag stitching and bread making, I've been following links from the Process Pledge. I've always worried that showing pictures of the same quilt over and over might drive away whatever readers I've got. And then I wind up not posting because I've only got that one quilt to post about. Maybe I should take the pledge.



I've also decided that I need a dishmat. A donut quilt would be very fun. I want to machine piece hexagons, probably cut from my vintage sheets, and I can't find the blog post that I want to link to because it's where I got the idea, which is annoying me.

"Who goes through 240 yards of fabric in a year?"

That's the gist of the comment that got me going this morning. Was twenty yards a month really that much?

So I did some rough estimating -- twenty-six baby quilts at 2 1/4 yards each...Seven yards for the madder snowballs....eight and a half for the blue sawtooth chain...seven more for the courtyard steps...another seven to back two tops I had already finished...a yard for the two bags I've made...

That's ninety yards so far this year, two hundred and sixteen if I keep it up. I've already taken some breaks, so it's not like I've been on an extended quilting binge here. My estimates were all low.

My stash suddenly feels a lot smaller, and I'm back to another question that occurs to me now and then. What would it cost to keep this up if I didn't have the thrift store bags? I could make some wild guesses based on the fact that I almost never spend more than four or five dollars a yard for my best fabric, but a lot of my quilts wouldn't exist if I hadn't had disposable stuff to work with, so who knows what I'd actually be doing.

It also makes me think that it would be interesting to keep track of the yardage I do use up. I seem to be using a lot more fabric than I would've given myself credit for!

Ten more blocks on the new quilt done, fifty-seven more to go. This is not the most fun project I've ever worked on.