Scrappy Saturday

Six more string blocks today, bringing my block count up to 24.  Another six blocks and I will move on to making sashings and nine patches.  The pickings in my string box are getting really blah - down to mostly neutrals and greens.  I had to supplement with fabrics from my 1.5" strip box, further solidifying in my mind that 1.5" should be my minimum string size.  These blocks were far more pleasurable to piece than the ones in which I used all those really skinny strings. 

I sliced up enough sashing strips and squares for another six Shady Lanes blocks.  Also did my daily 15 minutes of scrap taming.  So far, the results are less than dramatic.  But I've learned from past experience, that when trimming for 15 minutes on a daily basis, it's a good idea not to analyze how much is getting done versus how much is left to do - especially not in the first few days.

There's some really fun fabrics in the scrap pile.  Here's a pic of a sweet little lady bug fabric.  Let's see, how many bugs do we consider cute enough to like them on fabric?  Lady bugs, butterflies, dragonflies... yup, that's about it.  So far, I've found all three of those on fabrics in the scrap bin.  Haven't come across any creepy spiders on Hallowe'en fabrics yet and knowing the ladies who gave me these scraps, I don't think I'm likely to find any.

The best find today was this strip of googly eyes on black.  Isn't it a hoot?  Wish I had known I had this when I was making my fat cat in the stash crumb block (pic below).

I am definitely going to have to make another cat block and use some of those eyes in it. Just thinking about it is making me giggle.

I pulled out a red and cream quilt that needs to be trimmed, labeled, and bound - the last of the quilts that far along in my unfinished pile.  I want to make a striped bias binding for it - I think that will be really effective on my two colour quilt.   To trim the quilt and make bias binding requires some room to work and that necessitated a clean-up of the cutting area, which is set up on my kitchen counter.  I just can't seem to maintain the habit of tidying up at the end of each sewing session.  My sewing table and my kitchen table are piled high again.