Bits and Pieces and Pieces and Pieces

The Community First! Quilters recently were gifted a portion of a hoarder's stash and I've been curating it for the past several weeks: sorting, organizing, culling, selling, and generally getting to know every.single.piece. It has easily increased our stash by 50%, a stash which currently is homeless as we've lost our usual meeting and storage space. I've got four bins of our original stash at home with me and the other 15 or so are in our fearless leader's vehicle. When next we meet we'll have a better idea of the lay of the land, and where these bins are landing.

In the meantime! It's been very interesting seeing the results of a hoarder's addiction (which pales compared to the stash Nann had been describing throughout last year.) One of the oddest things I dealt with was scores of BOM bags that had been sold at $6/pound at a store going out of business. I know this because the sign was included with all those bags. A few were unique, but most were duplicates of BOM kits the store had made up but never sold. The biggest duplication was 17 kits of the same pattern/colorway. 

I tried folding all the identical pieces together, but that ended up being awkward and taking up a lot of room in their respective bins. As space needed to file FQs diminished, I finally decided to pull the biggest piles of all those BOM pieces and see what I could make of them. Backs, preferably, so I set up a spreadsheet with the goal square inchage (like footage, but for inches, yes?) of 7,000 (that covers something slightly less than 75"x95"), and started subtracting the pieces to see how far I could get.

Angry Birds, Angry Birds, Find a New Home!

Finished!

"Picket Fence" or "Home Awaits" pattern. 70"x90"

One Nibble at a Time

Sometimes the "elephant" seems too massive for a full bite, and one must nibble her way through to the other side.

I've spent this weekend nibbling on several large mounds piled hither and thither. During the week I've been working on quilting the Angry Birds (Ugh!) sandwich I created almost immediately after pinning the batik top from last post. I've had the backing for it for yonks (can you tell I enjoy British and Ozzie sitcoms?), and recently franken'ed a batting as well, so there was no reason for it to still be hanging about. Plus, I knew exactly how I wanted to quilt all aspects of it, so it was easy to put it ahead of the batik sandwich (the quilting of which I'm still pondering).

The "easy" parts were stippled, their borders filled with a simple wave pattern, then it came time to quilt the strips of 5-patches. I bitched and moaned about doing these with the last one, but this time I decided I'd go with option 2 of the three I set out for myself at the conclusion of that quilting session.

Busy Fortnight

It's been 2+ weeks since my last post, a quarter of which was stolen away from me by flu--the old-fashioned kind that requires a clear path to the toilet at all times, and a bucket in hand! It seemed to be a 72-hour bug and I'm back to my old self now.

Winding Ways went from a gleam to a finish in these past 16 days! Before being felled, I had added borders (finding the perfect fabric in the CF!Q legacy stash, as I'd hoped), made a back from the blue dot fabric that didn't work in the front (including a couple more FQs from the CF!Q stash), sandwiched the lot and outline-quilted all the inner blocks. Contrary to all teachings and advice from time immemorial, I made the borders to the size the blocks should measure, not what reality might dictate. As a result, the sandwiching involved quite a bit of careful pulling and close pinning so nothing shifted.

Queue

We've all been there: a room with a hint of a suggestion of a loose idea of a line. Nobody's officially in charge, but every person in that room knows exactly their position in the invisible queue. Newcomers are eyeballed suspiciously--will they try to jump ahead? Fat chance of that happening; a gentle correction ("I believe she was here before you") generally keeps things well in (invisible) line. The only time I've heard any kind of disagreement in these situations is when one person suggests, "You were here before me?" and the other replies, "No, no--you go first."

This phenomenon isn't restricted to mere mortals, by the way. As various projects were coming out of Leader-Ender status and into Full-on-Project mode . . .

All the triangle squares for the Lady of the Lake centers, sewn into 3- and 5-square strips.

Lap Lady of the Lake Finished

53" x 66"

 This doesn't look much different from the last time I posted about it (gosh, nearly a year ago?!?), but let me show you what's changed.

A Quilt Block Winds Its Way into a Bar . . .

. . . and says to the bartender, "Tell me a funny joke. I like to be kept in stitches."

And so was I introduced to the "Winding Ways" block this weekend, quite unexpectedly!