After we finished  four customer quilts last week  I decided to throw one of my tops onto Millhouse. Along with my commitment to binding an old project every month, I also want to quilt more of my own works. We have cupboards full of beautiful tops, and it's so easy to put a customer quilt on the machine and neglect our own.

For something easy I chose Floribunda, one of Bonnies patterns. I wanted to do an edge to edge, and I knew that would suit this busy top. No sense putting custom work on a top unless it will show up, and these florals would hide any detail.

I chose one of Keryn's designs, Winter Rose, to keep the floral theme going.

Remember all those blocks I rejected for the front? They found a home on the back, along with lots of other floral fabrics, cut into 9 or 10" squares. And STILL there are more of these fabrics in my stash, sigh. Not enough for another quilt like this, but they're lurking in odd corners.

At the beginning I thought I might use other pastels for the background instead of just yellow, hence this pale green block. I didn't really like the effect, and I didn't have enough pallid fabric anyway. So the block ended up with the others on the back.

I forget how satisfying it is to hang up a newly finished quilt and look at all that glorious texture. There are so many memories bound up in this, of the places I bought the fabrics, the piecing, the setting together, making the back and now the quilting. I marvel at all that fabric out of my stash, about 13 metres I think, and the great feeling of knowing that I made something lovely out of all those bits and pieces. And now if I can only get around to binding it in a timely manner, it will be completely done.

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I based the idea of my  blue quilt on a photo I saw on a blog, and then I couldn't remember where I'd seen it. I finally worked out it was Jo's Country Junction, and I found the post in question. Lots of inspiration in those vintage quilts. (Go and visit her blog and read the archives, soo much entertainment there! And check out their new book too)

This is something that we miss out on in Australia, you don't commonly find old quilts anywhere, unless it's at a dealer or a quilt show. We did have at least one quilt in our history- our Mum clearly remembered a yo-yo quilt that her grandmother had made but it wasn't valued and was lost or fell apart. And technically I suppose it wasn't a 'proper' quilt anyway.

I once found a beautiful crazy quilt at a second hand store in the eighties, but they wanted $75 for it and I was too poor to even think about spending that much on a textile I couldn't use because it was so fragile. Keryn and I call these items 'archival' which means that we're rescuing them so they can be preserved, but they can only be stored away, never used. It would be nice to save them all, but we're not a museum, and we have to be selective in what we buy now.

The place where Jo saw those quilts was called Clear Lake, and I somehow started thinking of the sqinsq top as Blue Lake, and that reminded me of the tin paintboxes that we had as children.

 Most of them were quite small, but a friend of our Mum passed on a clearly superior one when her family had finished with it. It was huge, and while some of the pans were empty, the names were still printed underneath, fascinating things like Viridian and Vermillion and Scarlet Lake and Madder Lake.

Keryn and I and our brother used that box until there was nothing left and no doubt Mum just threw it out without a backward glance. I do wish we still had it and I could read those names again, just to relive the tremendous excitement we felt when we opened the lid and saw all those little rectangles waiting. I went on to have a huge obsession with art and painting and that window into the romantic names of colour was one of the earliest memories of my interest.

So I've decided that my top will be Blue Lake and the brown one will be Madder Lake, but beyond that I don't think I'll venture. Unless I find another pattern because I think I've had enough of the large square in squares...

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Phew, the blue square in square top is done and I can work with something other than mid blue for a change! Perhaps there were so many of these fabrics languishing in my stash because I found them quite boring to work with in the first place. I love the finished top, but it almost put me to sleep sewing it! At least there are now three metres less of them in the fabric drawers.

When I was laying these blocks out on the design wall and trying desperately not to have similar fabrics next to each other, I realised the beauty of the true two-colour quilt. If you were only using two fabrics in the whole thing you could start to piece it together right from the start. You could build it row by row and never have to worry about 'placement' because it isn't relevant - every block is identical. I might have to test that out, and see if the tedium of only two fabrics is more than balanced by the ease of construction. It really did take me two days to get these blocks settled (I worked on other projects while I ruminated on the design wall) and it would be nice to skip that step altogether.

Another thing that annoyed me with this top was the pressing; I tried alternating the seams but still ended up with huge bumps at the intersections. In the end I pressed the joining seams open, which I don't like to do. For my next version of this pattern I might press the sqinsq units open and the block seams to one side and see if that works.

As Keryn can testify, I'm even more picky over the "perfect" pressing order than I am about "placement". I'm really not OCD about everything- observe the untouching points in the top- but I'll trade touching points for 'nice and flat' because that matters to me. Pick your battles, and your obsessions...

I was going through this book yesterday, and guess what I found?

Another large square in square quilt. I like the half square triangles around the edge, and I do have lots and lots of greens in my stash.....I hope I don't do something I'll regret later!

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 I'm determined to keep up with Julie's  Binding Blitz this year and finish at least one binding a month. This poor little quilt has been folded up since (ahem) 2008. The binding was made at the same time, so what excuse can I trot out for neglecting to finish it before this?

  I love the look of the soft  purple binding fabric against the white border, and it took about an hour to sew, as I machined the whole thing.

The top was made from pastel fabric swatches from quilt shop samples and the bits of white on white material that had somehow accumulated in my stash. I never buy WOW because it's usually too thin for my liking and the seams shadow through. Some of them also have a hard painted finish which I dislike.
Today  I would just put them in the op shop pile, but back then I was more dedicated to Using Stuff Up. And this little cot quilt did use up every single bit of both pastel squares and WOW fabric, so I was very pleased at the time.

The Statler  was still a great novelty when I quilted this, using a butterfly panto of Keryn's. I quilted a lot of tops in those early months of owning the longarm; it quite went to my head how easily these languishing UFOs could be finished!

Well, not quite finished though, because I didn't keep up with the binding , and in the blog post above I mentioned that I'd just caught up. This little quilt was another wave of unbound projects, some of which I'll be finishing this year, hopefully. I'm glad Julie has motivated me to actually do something about them after all this time.

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 I've finished eighty of my large sq in sq blocks and I threw them up on the design wall. I like the variations in the blues; none of them are anything other than mid value but some of the fabrics seem quite dark next to the paler ones. I drove myself mad over a two day period, arranging and then rearranging so that I didn't have the same fabrics next to each other. In the end I had to ignore ones that were adjacent diagonally or I would have ended up rocking in a corner muttering "They're touching, they're touching....." Therein lies madness. No doubt when I've got two more seams to sew I'll find some pair that I've overlooked, but I've had enough!

 I've sewn a chunk of sixteen blocks together and I like the effect of disappearing stars here and there. I'm looking forward to getting these set into one piece, and as we have a long weekend coming up I'm hoping I can cross this off the list.
 I have a nagging suspicion that it's going to end up too small for my liking, but if I decide to make more there is still  plenty of this mid blue to cut up.

I treated myself to a new book the other day, Sujarta Shah's   Cultural Fusion Quilts. I can hardly wait to try some of the techniques in here, my mind is buzzing with ideas already. But first I have to finish some of the other projects that I'm working on, or I'll be swamped.

Inspired by the four-patch madness infecting blogland I dug out an old project using shedloads of the little beggars and I'm using them as Leader-enders. That makes about five things I'm working on at the same time and I'm starting to feel overwhelmed. This weekend should be a good time to get at least two of them finished to the top stage, so that's my little challenge to myself. Let you know how that pans out.....

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 After I started making my giant sq in sq blocks I was looking through one of my quilt history  books, and as is the way of these things,  I found another example.

This one is in creams and maddery reds and browns, which is much more my cup of tea, colour wise. And stash wise.

The blocks are roughly ten inches, so they finish quite a bit bigger than mine. This isn't constructed as a sq in sq block, but rather hourglass blocks set in altenate rows of bown and cream squares. I think I'll stick to my design because to make the larger blocks I'd need to start with a 7 1'2" square, and an 8 1/4" one for the quarter sq triangles. I want to use some scraps and those measurements are a tad on the large size for me.  Interestingly the cream and brown setting fabrics seem to be the same fabric repeated over and over, and the hourglass blocks use scraps, including some blue grey triangles.

I grabbed some of my scraps, made four blocks to see whether I liked the darker colours, and I think I have another project underway!

And what about this gorgeous toile on the back? Might have to look out for something like that in my travels.....

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 I was cutting up some blue fabric the other day, and as I looked through the stash I realised that I have rather too much of this lighter blue material hanging around. Most of it is old, because I haven't bought this colour since, well, last century really. I just don't use it, for some reason.

I love my indigos and the patterned navy fabric with coloured prints,

 I like some of the pale blue stuff I have. (Don't ask me why those yellow pieces are in that drawer, I only just noticed them...)

 I love, love the reproduction mid blues.

 But the bright mid blue gets passed over time and again.

As I comb through the stash I've been trying to discover which groups of fabric I don't use and set them aside. If I know I'll never buy them again, I want to use them up and make that the end of the story. I suppose I could sell them on ebay or just give them away, but it's not as if I don't like the fabric...I just don't use it. And I no longer buy it, so once it's gone, it's gone.

I used a heap of old florals and yellow fabric in Bonnies Floribunda, and loved finally playing with them.

I collected very dark greens and yellowy creams from the stash drawers  to cut into 1 3/4" squares for four-patches - if I come across anything  of this colour, even scraps, it gets cut into that size and put in the tin.

It seems that once I have a project for these groups of fabric I don't mind their presence anymore- I know what I'm doing and they'll eventually be used and gone. I've decided to make these giant sq in sq blocks with the bright blues - they end up about 7" so they cover a lot of ground quickly. I doubt this will use all of them, but I'm hacking up swathes of fabric and the smaller bits are disappearing completely.

I don't know how big the top will end up, at the moment I'm just having fun getting this out of the stash and up on the design wall.

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I was originally going to set these blocks on point, with cream squares in between, but when I laid them out I realised there was going to be far too much blank space. The stars were lost amongst it all, and I decided I needed to make some sort of alternate setting block.

I thought of all the extra stars and wondered if I could use them in some way....

I came up with this block, which still has lots of cream fabric in it, but has a bit more interest than just a large square.

I needed twenty of them, so I sewed them up, then set  all the blocks together on point.

I used a large floral to make the triangles along the edge, cutting them a bit larger and edging them with the cream fabric.  I still have to trim the sides and straighten everything up, but I'm quite happy with how this top came together.

I will probably put some borders around this, but as it's quite large they won't be very big. It's far too hot to be wrestling with metres of material at the moment; when it cools down I'll go back to working on it. Yay!  FIFTY of the stars gone in one top, I'm a bit pleased.

There are still piles of them left in the box, possibly two or three quilts worth, because I've added more stars to the total over the years, but there's definitely a big difference. I used to have two boxes of stars, and now they all fit into one, that's progress, isn't it?

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Years ago, I made 177 eight point star blocks, which I talked about here, and here. I've used a few since then,

this blue and white and yellow version,

the borders in this top,

and this small quilt.

 I also added strips and squares  to thirty of the blocks, intending to make another top, but I hadn't realised how large that quilt would be, and it rather put me off. At that time I had no access to a longarm, and the thought of quilting this on a domestic machine was daunting, so I just let the blocks sit. I decided a few weeks ago that these blocks would be my new UFO project to finish off. It's been very satisfying getting some of these old projects dealt with, and I'll show you soon what I did with these blocks....

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 I was appalled to realise that I only quilted one quilt for myself last year, in November, and I didn't even bind it so it couldn't really be counted as  finished. Last Saturday I decided that I was going to get it done, inspired by JulieKQuilts, who is having a Binding Blitz this year. I have about seven other quilts that need binding, so I'm hoping that I clear the backlog once and for all.

When I hung the quilt up in the workroom to take a photo, I said to Keryn "It's only taken 28 years to finish this!". I was pregnant with my youngest son, who is 27 now, when I started these blocks, inspired by a quilt in a Ladies Circle Quilts magazine. (Gosh I miss that, it was a treasure trove of antique and vintage quilts)

My  blocks were pieced with larger squares and weren't as complicated as the original, which I'd still like to copy, now that I look at it. My blocks were all hand-pieced, and I had a huge number of cream squares cut, which I intended to set the blocks with. What a lot of set-in seams that would have been, but I honestly don't mind hand work. What stalled me was that the material was Actil sheeting, and I just couldn't bring myself to use poly fabric with all the cotton patchwork fabric.  I was so poor at the time I didn't have enough good quality cream to use, so the project sat and was forgotten.

When I got the blocks out and looked at them again a couple of years ago, I decided to set in triangles around the edges of the blocks and sash them, a mammoth undertaking, and I resorted to sewing the last few blocks on the machine. The fabrics are so old and dated, I really didn't care about them anymore, I just wanted them Done!

I set them with a tan fabric because they were such weird old colours nothing else seemed to tone with them, and then added  some chunks of fabric at either end to make it longer. I'm not really happy with the effect, but it will be used on my bed with Pippi sleeping on or under it, so it doesn't really matter. I'll have a new quilt on the bed this winter, huzzah!

This morning in my postie role I was delivering an armful of  parcels, and wrestled with a clunky homemade latch on the gate. I was horrified when it took an absolute chunk out of my finger - I know the letterboxes that are going to bite me and treat them cautiously, but this took me unawares. There was a horrid white scoop completely taken out of my index finger, and as it filled up with blood I thought "I won't be able to use a rotary cutter now...." I left a trail of blood drips up the path and all over the verandah, and the owner rushed and got a handful of tissues and a bandaid for me. I'm going to have to soak this off and replace it with a proper dressing soon, which is going to be quite painful, but I can't leave this on.The worst thing is that I was in the middle of a glorious spree of scrap cutting and kitting some new blocks, and I'll have to wait until I can put pressure on this finger before I can go back to it. And I won't be doing any customer quilts while it's so sore. Grrr!

Not to mention that I can't type without many many errors, thank goodness for tha backspace key!

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