Going to Pieces

Baggies of squares -- this is only the start.  I decided to do a little straightening in my fabric closet.  After taking out a few bags is batting I realized they were resting on a plastic storage box I hadn't opened in ... who knows? In it were baggies of scraps broadly sorted by color.  That should have been satisfactory.  But no, I was having a neatnik day.  So I decided the cut the scraps -- after ironing -- into usable sizes and shapes: i.e., squares from 5 inches to 2 inches, with all the half-inch steps between. PLUS -- I had already decided to make  6 inch strip-pieced blocks since I had over 30 already made. PLUS #2, I've been thinking of making a Chinese coin quilt for some time so I thought I'd cut rectangles for it.

Well ... I've been at it for three days. The sets have out grown those baggies in the picture and I've now made 80 strip-pieced blocks and am contemplating whether to make a total of 120 or even 140, which I'll need if I put them together  without stripping. But with stripping, I can stop at 80, I figure. The strips are really random and varied and I think a quilt would be most attractive with wide enough stripping to give order to the general chaos of color and pattern so I'm inclined to stop making the blocks. 

I have not quite dealt with half the scraps in that box.  I'm finding scraps that remind me of many quilts I've made in the last, oh, maybe ten years.  My thinking is this:  when I have squares, by the hundred, in various sizes I will be ready for all kinds of quilts.  Or, if I keep doing other kinds of quilts that don't require a lot of squares,  they are always possible give-aways.  So I will carry on, probably all the rest of the week.  And then I'll make the strip quilt. At one cockamamie point I thought I'd probably use up all my strips -- ha!  At the moment I have enough for another 80 blocks and when I'm through the waiting scraps I'll probably have enough for three strip-pieced quilts.  They make good charity quilts and don't require serious quilting -- in fact, at six inches, they are good candidates for tying.  So I will stay quite busy for some days -- or more likely it will be weeks --yet.