Does it pain you????

Do you sometimes feel squeamish when you cut up a favorite fabric?

 

Do you feel like once you have cut it up, you won't be able to look at it and fondle it in your stash?

 

Well, I am starting to feel that about my Americana fabrics that I cut up for my QofV quilt.   I cut then ALL up.  There is not one piece of Americana left in my stash and I am feeling a little sad.

 

 

I laid some of them out last night.....

 

 

and quickly realized that I needed my "white" (or in my case, cream) to add a little spark to this quilt.

 

I didn't have one piece left in my "cream" drawer, but tonight I did some more searching because I really wanted to make up a block or two so I could take some measurements and figure out just how many blocks I need, how many strips I needed to cut, etc. 

 

Well, in my golden section of fabrics I found this......truly my last piece of Americana.

 

 

Definitely one of my favorite fabrics.  It was just a scrap.  I think I may have used this one on a back of a quilt, so there wasn't much, but I cut it ALL up, too. 

 

Now this is what my blocks look like with a "light" in them. 

 

 

I like them much better. 

 

Now to do some figuring as I am sure I don't have enough of this flag fabric for all the blocks.  I may have to buy maybe a couple different lights and mix them all up. 

 

I have sewn 12 blocks already and I am left with 172 red/blue strips and only 16 golden strips.

 

I was thinking of making the quilt somewhere in the vicinity of 70 x 80. 

 

Now I have to do the math and see just what else is needed before I sew any blocks together. 

 

This will be a quick quilt....scrappy.....and hopefully very loved by some veteran later next year. 

 

Ok...on to the dreaded math. I probably should just dig up my EQ and do it the easy way, but I haven't used it in so long it would probably take me longer to figure it out than it would to just draw out my blocks and figure out the math. 

 

Ok...I am happy, even though I am going to miss these fabrics in my stash, I am going to love making this quilt and giving it away.    

 

 

 

 

Quilts of Valor on my mind.....

My guild and my retreat that I go to in June every year have designated Quilts of Valor as our challenge for the year. 

 

I saw a quilt while browsing blogs just yesterday and thought that would be a good idea and should have saved it, but I didn't think I would be thinking of starting one this early, but I have a friend who has hers all done for next June!  Geesh!!

 

So I pulled all my Americana fabrics today just to see what I had and cut them all in strips.

 

 

If I can remember what that quilt looked like, this is the layout.

 

 

In going through my stash, I could only find reds and blues in my Americana theme.  I started thinking "where did I use up all those fabrics?"

 

So, I started looking through the house and came up with at least three Americana-type quilts.

 



 

This one is an Alex Anderson quilt that I made in 1999 (my all time favorite) and I just cut up the last of some of these fabrics.

 

 

This one is a sampler.  I forgot to look when this one was made, but I don't think any of these fabrics were cut up tonight.

 

 

Another one of my favorites.  Now I know some of these fabrics I still had and this is an old one, too.

 

I actually cut up all my blues and reds but there was not one cream with stars or flags left in my stash.  I did purge all my small pieces of fabrics last year and that may be where some of them went or maybe I just used them up, so I am going to have to go buy some more keeping in mind that I don't want to "build up the stash" at this point. 

 

So, stay tuned for what I come up with for my Quilts of Valor challenge.

 

I haven't posted much lately.  Doesn't seem like I have been doing much, but I did bind the last two quilts that I quilted.  One of these days I will get them outside to hang and take some good pictures of them finished and then post them, but for now, I hope you are getting some stitches in and I hope my motivation is back (since I straightened up my sewing room today) and just maybe I will have a new quilt to show soon.

 

Happy Quilting.