Stash Manager's Report

I am a few days late with the Sunday Stash Report, and that's okay. Life has been busy lately! Saturday I finished my Quilt for an Hour project, and I like it so much. I've washed the backing pieces, and tomorrow I hope to sew the two lengths together and get it to my good friend Ann this week for quilting. I'm going to ask her to quilt a baptist fan pattern on it. Ann has quilted that pattern on a couple of other quilts for me, and it's a great pattern. Between the backing and binding I cut to finish up the QFAH, I used 4-1/8 yards.

On Sunday I put a practice quilt sandwich on the longarm and played for several hours with some free motion work and some pantograph work. That used another 4 yards. I'm pretty terrible at staying on the line right now, but hopefully I'll get better with practice. Since I'm going to be doing lots of practice pieces, I may as well work on something useable, so I cut out one of Mary's strippies last night and rummaged around in the stash for more fabric for strippies. I really like what Pat is doing, making these little strippies as donation quilts.

So here's the Sunday Stash Report (on Tuesday):

Fabric used this week: 8-1/8 yards
Fabric used year to date: 79-5/8 yards
Fabric added this week: 0 yards
Fabric added year to date: 125-5/8 yards
Net year to date: - 46 yards

I'm finally headed in the right direction!

I was so busy finishing up the QFAH that I have neglected my Orange Crush mystery quilt--still only have 7 blocks done from the most recent step. So I'll be working on that the rest of the week in the hopes of getting that step finished before Bonnie posts the next one. I'm excited now to see the mystery revealed!

While I was working on the Orange Crush blocks, I remembered another quilt that Bonnie did that seemed similar to me. Sure enough her Cathedral Stars pattern, which is also a two-block quilt, uses one of the same blocks, only the units are turned differently. The alternate block, would you believe, has the same stars in it like the block we just finished for the QFAH. I thought the Cathedral Stars was a gorgeous quilt when Bonnie was raffling it and wanted to make it.

I liked working on two or three different quilts all at the same time these past few weeks, so I 'd like to start working on a couple more shortly, Cathedral Stars and something else. But not until the Orange Crush is done!

I've spent loads of time out in the yard digging up weeds the last several days. I've declared war on the wild violets; and even though the herbicide appears to be doing some damage, I think it's probably still necessary to dig the rhizomes out of the ground, so I've been chipping away at it. It's exhausting, back breaking work. No grass yet under the straw on the other end of the yard.

I got an email from a friend of mine today, one of those that seems to circulates all over, but I'd never seen it before. How many times have you tried to tear off a piece of aluminum foil or saran wrap from the roll and had the whole roll pop out of the box? Did you know that on the end of some brands of foil and saran wrap, there's a little cardboard tab that you can push in to lock the roll in place? I've been buying Reynolds for years and NEVER noticed this! Who knew?

Credit where credit is due:

Shadowy Stars quilt design by Judy Laquidara