One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

This pretty flicker spent some quality time outside my sewing room window today trying to cheer me out of my funk about The Buttonhole closing.






So I'm supposed to be concentrating on finishing things, right? I did get another Dutch Treat block done last night while watching TV. It's called Water Lily.


But today I took two steps back and added two more UFO's to the list.




First of all while looking for something else I unearthed a box with some red and white Christmas squares. Do you remember those fabric wreaths that were so popular in the late 80's or early 90's....Styrofoam wreaths with fabric squares poked into them? Like this?

Two of my earliest bed quilts started by removing the squares from a wreath hanging on my living room wall..I'll show you those quilts another time.

At a garage sale quite some time ago I bought a red and white wreath thinking I could do the same thing. At some point I pulled the squares out and since they were cut with pinked edges I was able to toss them into a net bag and launder them without terribly ravely edges. Then I put them in a box and forgot about them.

Well when I found the box today I was in a mood to be easily distracted so I decided to do something with them. Since the person that made the wreath wasn't cutting pieces for a quilt, the squares weren't all that uniform in size. I was dreading the idea of having to trim 120 + squares individually. I'm a "get to the fun part fast" sort of girl.

So I decided I could at least cut the trimming part in half or maybe fourths. I stacked a white square and a red square and trimmed only two adjacent sides like this:



I did this to all of the squares in pairs and then sewed them into four patches, keeping the untrimmed edges to the outside. Make sense?

Then I just trimmed the entire blocks. It not only took care of the other half of the trimming but ensured that I ended up with perfectly sized blocks.

In really short order I had 33 four patches. I could have still been squaring up the individual squares!

Now I need to decide what I'm going to do with them.

Then I finished piecing an assortment of squares sent to me by my daughter-in-law. They were already cut, though again not very uniformly..actually not even close. And I spent a LOT of time last weekend trimming them to the same size. She bought these at an estate or garage sale so we don't know who saved this collection of fabrics. Obviously someone who likes lots of BRIGHT, LOUD, fabric. It's definitely not even close to something I'd put together, as much as I love variety and scrap quilts. But there was also something kind of quirky cute about this mismatch of fabrics so I decided to go with it.

Even LOUDER when you get up close! I think it's kind of 60's Flower Power meets 70's Funk.

Now I have to decide if I add a funky border or just quilt it up as is for a fun sofa throw? I kind of think either a stripe or large polka dot??