Crossroads – Phase 2.5: The Side Project(s)

Last night DH stopped dead in his tracks in the doorway of the sewing room and said “It looks like your KF fabrics exploded in here!”

Yes,  I am a hugely messy quilter.

At the start of a project (when it is still just A BIG IDEA), I pull all the fabric that could POSSIBLY work, then bit by bit, narrow down the selection – but I leave it out on the worktable – just in case.

Next, time to go back in and pull out more – because you just never know what might become the “Ah HAH!” in a project.

Knowing that this is one of those great PERSONAL TRUTHES (right up there with refusing to eat beets and insisting that I do NOT have enough pairs of Chucks), it made sense to start making more than one quilt at a time out of the same basic fabrics.  Seriously, most of the fabric is stacked up around the worktable anyway.

Never let a good mess go to waste!

For example:  during a rant about hating KF shot cottons, I made Optic Squares:And as the companion project, Optic Stripes rose from the ashes of the shot cottons that didn’t work:In a frenzy of putting my black and whites to work, I made Memories in Black and White:and Black and White Optics :From my purple stash, Purple Improv: Controlled Entropy:and the bits and pieces of cutaways and leftovers yielded Purple Improv 2:It’s fun to start a little side project when things start to get monotonous.  My brain gets a break, I get fired up again, and it’s all good.

So what about with Crossroads?  Here it is on the wall, waiting for the final decision(s):I accumulated two piles of cut-off scraps:  one enormous pile of mostly strips and one equally enormous pile of left-over triangles from the blocks.

Then came the request for instructions to make a herringbone quilt.  Yippee!  The strip pile was commandeered and pressed into service.  That left the triangle pile looking a bit forlorn.

During a break in the Crossroads piecing marathon (it feels that way sometimes) I pulled out the KF golden yellow rejects.  Pair the yellow rejects with one of the half square triangles in the scrap pile, a quick stitch and trim (my favorite part about HST’s is being able to trim them to size) and let’s just see what we’ve got here – my first layout looked like this:I like the way the rings of color fade in and out, but what if I could add even more fabric from my stash in order to make this more interesting?

I pulled more mediums from the stash just for the heck of it, then rearranged the pattern so that the concentric diamonds are a little more visible:Yessss!  I so LOVE this!  Those cornea-searing yellows look perfectly fine next to the the purples and blues of the darker rings.

And more leftovers can work their way into the herringbone!  The greens and magentas are next!  Wonder how they’ll look?

Three quilts going at one time is a little excessive, even for me.  But come on!!  Isn’t this a BLAST???

All the best – Chris