Scrappy Sunday

I managed to get to the sewing machine before Lucas settled in for his afternoon snooze today and quickly sewed up another 6 string blocks.  I think I'll move on to making sashing strips and 9 patches in my next crumb/string session.

Even just making a few blocks a week and these stacked up quite quickly.  I have 30 string blocks (8.5" square) and 48 crumb blocks (6" square) since starting this process two months ago.

Pieced another 4 crumb blocks today.  Tonya's book is in the mail so I will get back to trying out more letters and words when it arrives.

My crumb bin is filling up fast from all the scrap trimming I've been doing.  Some of the quilters on the Liberated Quilters Yahoo Group mentioned that they sort and bag their small fabric bits by colour and keep them with the larger pieces and yardage in their stash.  That would certainly make it easier to make a more co-ordinated looking crumb quilt.  Mine is looking more like a dog's breakfast really and not a good representative of what can be done with crumb blocks.  There are some real beauties in the pics at the Crumb-Along Flickr Pool.  I have to say, though, that the very idea of sorting out the crumbs by colour isn't very appealing to me.  It might make a good take-along chore at Christmas time when I'll be away from my sewing machine and slowly going mad from the withdrawal.

And the final choice on the Shady Lanes borders?  I didn't like the black floral afterall.  I figured that out after walking past the display just a few times.  I thought it looked too dark and with none of the scrap fabrics in it, it made me wrinkle my nose every time.  I've decided to go really simple.  Some of the neutral, the dark red stripe, the half-square triangles and some more neutral to stabilize the sawtooth piecing.  The last time I had piecing that went to the edge of the quilt, I lost my points when the quilt was squared and trimmed.

Tomorrow I'll start adding borders.  Tonight, I'm going to spend some time exploring in my 2" strip bin, to see if I can come up with 100 different co-ordinated fabrics for the 100-patch block.  I don't get to start sewing anything new until I finish a couple of projects, but it's a good sitting in front of the television activity.  At least it keeps me from snacking.