I'm sewing another set of blocks together and it didn't seem to be flowing smoothly. I'm loving how the blocks look together, but something wasn't quite right. I finally worked out that it's my leader-ender project that is slowing me down!

I'm making Bonnie's Garden Party, and all the little 1 1/2" pieces are great for chewing up those scraps, and the tiny seams make the units mount up quickly. I'm using orange for the setting blocks instead of red, and they went together fast and kept things moving along. I've made 49 of them and I'll need more but I decided to make a start on the alternate blocks as well.  As soon as I started on the cross blocks I seemed to slow down to a crawl, which slowed down my other project too.

Once I realised that, I examined what was going on, and found that I don't like just grabbing bits out of a huge tray of cut pieces. The orange blocks are totally random and I'm fine with that, but I wanted the cross blocks to use only two contrasting fabrics(besides the white). I seemed to spend a lot of time trying to find a particular colour or a missing square, or discovering that there weren't actually enough pieces of that matching fabric.

So this afternoon I sat down and sorted the whole mess out; I put all the corner bits together so that I can sew them as  units, and added the centre square so that it didn't get used in another block. Then I added the light squares for the corner so that it was all in one little pile ready to go.

I'm so much happier now that I can see where I'm going with this and I can make a rough count of how far along I am and how much more to cut. This tray will live next to the sewing machine, and I'll just pick up a little bundle and sew that together in between the seams of my other project. No more scrabbling around....The only danger is that it looks so tempting I'll have to stop myself sewing them all up at once.

And in other news, I finally bound my Floribunda quilt, it's only a year since I quilted it! I love finishing the binding, I don't know why I put it off.