This fabric is NOT ugly. 

True, it's yet another brown floral (what is it with all the brown florals in my stash, anyway?), but not necessarily UGLY for that.  I prefer to think of it as "difficult," or maybe "attractiveness-challenged." 

It's been in my stash for many years, almost as long as I've been quilting.  When I started quilting, my fabric purchases were all itsy ditsy floral prints.  That's what I thought of as quilting fabric.  How naive! 

Then I must have read somewhere that it's better to choose fabrics with textural variety:  little prints, big prints., stripes, plaids, etc.  So I started picking up big prints, willy-nilly, without paying much attention to anything but scale.  Thus all the weirdly colored florals, like this one, and my other browns, and the neon cabbage roses.

In any case, I've got a good chunk of it, about 2 yards, and it's 56 inches wide.  So that's definitely enough to be a focus fabric for a quilt. 

Next step:  diving into my stash to pull out other fabrics that will pick up the colors (besides BROWN) in this print.

If you don't know where you're going, how do you know when you get there?  This is my quandary with the pineapple blocks.

 
When I started this project, it was more like an experiment than a project.  I just wanted to see what I might do with my 1-inch and 1 1/2-inch scrap strips.  So I pulled out a set of yellow ones that I had in quantity, and made the first round of tiny pineapples.  One thing led to another, and before long I had 30 of the little devils.  To make them less devilish and small, I framed them with 2-inch strips and squares.  That's 30 7-inch blocks.

Now what?

Since my 30 blocks were a combination of 12 with light corners and 18 with dark corners, that presented a design challenge to put them all together.   I finally settled on 5 stacks of 6 blocks, with the 12 light corners on the outside and the dark corners in the center.   Not ideal, but better than anything else I tried, and it had the virtue of simplicity.  It wasn't what I would have planned, but then, I didn't plan, did I?

Even with the wider strips framing the pineapples, they were still very busy-looking blocks.

Not to mention that they still only added up to 30 x 35 inches.

Solution:  turn the blocks on-point and add alternate plain blocks.  Perfect!  I love how the corner triangles of the pineapples and the corner squares of the frames form "chains" across the quilt.

Finding the right fabrics for the alternate blocks turned out to be an interesting exercise.  My scrap collection now includes a sizable stack of 7 1/2-inch squares, all the rejected candidates.

I discovered that, even with fabrics that are basically all one color, some prints are very busy, while some are exceedingly boring.  Zoom in on that photo and you'll see what I mean.

Take that dark pink:  busy.  It isn't so much that there's a lot of pattern, but the value contrast within the print is rather bold.  And the pale green?  B-O-R-I-N-G.  It's a tiny, fine print of two very close-valued shades. 

Mixed all together, the alternate blocks finally achieved a balance.  I also tried to balance the lighter and darker values by concentrating darker ones in a center diamond.  Then I framed it all with an airy black & white print, for a complete change of texture.

It still isn't finished, though at this point I'm not sure what will come next.  I'm thinking of a series of borders.  Maybe I'll actually plan something, for a change.

After all the finicky piecing with the miniature pineapple blocks, I was yearning to see some results more quickly:  time to move on to larger strips.  So I framed each of the little pineapples with 2-inch strips and squares.  The top photo is a bunch of them on my design wall.   And here on the left is a better photo of one of the blocks.

Now I was really starting to get excited.  I just LOVE these blocks, and they were so much fun to make. Each one is a little color study.  For the pineapples with the dark centers and corners, I used darker fabrics in the corner squares, and for the light-center pineapples, light corner squares.  Then I paired a medium and a light for the two sides of the box. 

The real challenge was to work with whatever happened to be in my boxes of scrap strips, and especially to try and use up some fabrics that I had in excessive quantities.  Often, I find I work best when I have limitations.  It forces me to focus and to go into problem-solving mode.  Having too many choices makes my head spin.

Now that I had all these beautiful blocks, the next step would be figuring out what to do with them.

Crushed Pineapple.  That's what I'm going to call this quilt.   

It started as an experiment in using all the tiny strips I cut from my scraps.  These pineapple blocks (I made 30 of them) are truly tiny, made from 1-inch and 1 1/2-inch strips. 

First, I pulled out strips that I had in quantity:  a blue, a yellow, and a pink.  These I used to make rather structured blocks, like this one, and the blue one above.  That pretty much exhausted my supply of light 1 1/2-inch strips and dark 1-inch strips.

So then I started making pineapples with dark corners and light sides.  Since my supply of strips was now very assorted, these blocks are much more random in color.

It was fun for about 30 blocks, but honestly, after a while, it started to be tedious.  I was arranging the blocks on my design wall as I made them, and seeing how long it took for those 4-inch blocks to add up to any size at all was pretty discouraging. 

Clearly, I was NOT going to make an entire quilt from miniature pineapples.  To be continued ....... 

Someone from the Stashbusters group coined the term, "Wonder Fabric," as in, "I wonder how THAT got into my stash?"  or "I wonder what I was thinking when I bought that?" or "I wonder who would design something so hideous?" 

Well, this little gem truly has me wondering.  Fortunately, there is only 1 yard of it.  I thought I was challenged by the Morticia Addams brown floral, but this one really has me stumped.  Maybe if I cut it into truly tiny squares and mix it with lots of other fabric for a postage stamp quilt, the horror of it might be sufficiently diluted.  Any ideas?

Drum roll, please ....

My new ETSY shop is open at www.maggyloo.etsy.com!

I'm getting WAY ahead of myself with this announcement, but I just can't contain myself (besides, I need to explain where I've been the last couple of weeks).  I have discovered etsy, the online crafts market, where you can buy and sell all sorts of wonderful handmade items.  So I've been busy working on developing products, and slowly (very, very slowly) stocking the shop. 

So go create your own etsy account, then check out my sparse little shop, and add me to your favorites so I can get some hearts.

Correction!  I suggested that you add the border calculator to favorites instead of downloading and saving it ... WRONG!  If you want to use the border calculator, click the link, then click SAVE.  Otherwise, you won't be able to save your own calculations.  It will only work if you have Excel on your computer.  I'm still trying to figure out a way around that, but I'm not terribly hopeful.  Maybe I should ask my brother, who is a genuine nerd.  Every family needs one, ya know?