A Blessing In Disguise, Quilting Time!

 Well Hello Quilty Friends!  It's been awhile since our last chat.  Things have been quite busy out here in Podunk.  Lots of planting, puling weeds, picking wild berries and many other fun in the sun chores.

I'll try to share more on all those things later.  Right now I'm happy to be stuck inside for a few hours a day.  Why am I stuck indoors?  Well two bad reasons that in reality turn out to be a blessing in disguise.  

1.  I sneezed and knocked my back out of whack.  Now I have a hitch in my hip along with some pain and loss of mobility.

2.  The temperatures for the next 2 weeks will be at least 94 with a heat index of 100.

Not my idea of fun in the sun.  That's more like shake and bake.   I'm not going outside after 10 am for the next few days.  The plants can be water early in the morning when the temps are more Lea Anne approved.  

While I wait for the weather to break I could work on one of the many UFO's but I'm feeling the need to start something new and quick.  Something I could quilt on my domestic machine since there's a quilt on the frame that I have no interest in quilting right now.

 So here's the plan....

RED, WHITE AND BLUE!  Designing a new quilt and doing math doesn't appeal at the moment. A  quick Google search for free quilt of valor patterns brought up just what I needed.  Now to pull the fabrics.  I'm thinking scrappy is a good plan for whittling down those scrap bins.

The pattern I choose needs 2.5" red and white strips,10.5" blue squares and some large white squares for stars.  I thought I could find all that I needed in these bins.  Wrong!

I didn't have any blue print fabrics large enough.  A quick dig into the the fat quarters and yardage and TADA!  This is why when making a scrap quilt the scraps never decrease they always multiply.

The red and white fabrics came mostly from the scrap bin but I still needed to pull from my larger cuts of fabric.  Well, I didn't have to until I decided I didn't want any repeat fabrics in the quilt.  Mission accomplished with the whites.  I had to open a much treasured original Bee Basics fat quarter bundle. That's why we buy fabric, right?

Then it was time to dig for the rest of the reds.  Even with digging through the loose fat quarters and yardage I'm 17 fabrics shy of what is needed for no repeat fabrics.  Today I'll start cutting the white and blue fabrics.  I don't think I'll get it all done but it's a start and will give me time to make a decision.

Here's my treasured fabrics cabinet.  I pulled what I could from the red.  What's left in the red is duplicate fabrics and wrong shades of red.  Then there's my backings.  I could get 3 prints from the backings but then I would be adding a bunch of fabric to the scrap bins and possibly making a backing that I can't use in the future.  Now for the top shelf.  There is more than enough red fat quarters in my much loved FQ bundle stash.  Most still have the plastic and ribbons around them.  It makes me sick to my stomach to even think about opening the plastic in order to pull out the reds.  Then I think, why not just open them all and separate them by color?  The greedy side of me says, they are more valuable if you leave them alone.  I told myself I would never open a bundle unless I planned to use them all in one quilt.  Sigh...what is wrong with me!..It's just fabric!...I'll cross that bridge later in the week.  For now I'll cut what I have and let my mind toss around the idea of fat quarter bundle separation.

Let's move onto the quilt I plan to make before I have an fabric bundle separation anxiety attack.

The Stars and Stripes pattern has a free pdf that can be found here.  Scroll down on the page and look to the right for the picture of the quilt in the sidebar.  You'll find the pdf link there.  This picture is not my quilt. It's Suzy's from Suzy's Quilting Room Blog.  The quilt finishes at about 61 x 71.  The size and the simply design should make a for an easy to cut and quick to finish quilt.

See you soon with my progress and red fabric decision.

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