​Yikes!  It's Christmas Eve!  Christmas always has a way of sneaking up on me, but this is ridiculous.  So I'm taking a break for a week or so.  Have a very merry Christmas.

Every time I make a queen-size bed quilt, at some point in the process I start to think of second grade catechism with Sister Norma.  Definition of a mortal sin:

1)  It has to be BIG

2) You have to KNOW that it's BIG

3)  You do it ANYWAY.

Now it's time to sew all 800 pairs of vanilla + color triangles.  I'm ready to repent.

First, pull out 80 triangle pairs (four for each block), in any random colors.  These get sewn into bigger triangles, like the photo.  Half of them need to be left-handed and half right-handed.

All the rest of the triangles pairs get sewn into bias squares.  Again, half left-handed and half right-handed.  (Just kidding about that, though the left/right thing will get to be very important, and possibly very aggravating, in the next step.)

To be continued ....

rying to work with ugly fabric can be so demoralizing.  I need comfort food.  

How about an ice cream sundae?  

Think of the brown floral as chocolate.  Of course, with that green in there, it would have to be chocolate-covered olives or something ... No, just chase that image right out of your head.  

Anyway, if I think of the brown floral as chocolate, then the light floral might be vanilla with, you know, those rainbow sprinkles on it.  

Is this image working for you?

Since the color in the light print gets kind of lost, I want to use patchwork to extend the theme of lots of colors on a vanilla background.  With a little more rummaging in my stash, I find a latte-colored monochrome floral.  The print has that same I-came-from-a-haunted-Victorian-mansion style as the other 2 fabrics.  Perfect.  

It also has the same drabness that plagues the other two. Maybe mixing in lots of color will liven it up.  One can always hope.

With a sigh worthy of Jane Eyre, I cut 400 3-inch squares (40 for each of the 20 blocks I'm making), and slice the squares diagonally to yield 800 half-square triangles.  Now I need an assortment of reds, blues, greens, and purples to make another 800 triangles to pair with them. 

There I was, confronting a snarling brown-and-green large-scale floral behemoth.   Seriously.  If it was an inch, it was 4 1/2 yards.

I remember thinking it was gorgeous when I bought it, eons ago.  I must have been depressed at the time.  

Really, it's good quality stuff, and rather elegant in a Morticia Addams sort of way.  But since the local funeral parlor wasn't planning to re-upholster, I was going to have to quilt with it.  I needed a plan.

Searching through my stash, I found a promising companion fabric:  a floral with reds, blues, purples and greens on a background the color of coffee with a lot of cream.  Sounds colorful, doesn't it?  Nope.  The miniscule spots of color were overwhelmed by a sea of tan with an overlay of tiny black dots.  I had 3 1/2 yards of it. 

The two fabrics seems to have some kinship.  I checked the selvages.  Sure enough, they were both reproductions from the 1840s.  It must have been a bleak decade.

Ugly or not, the pair had the first essential element of a good quilt:  strong value contrast.  I was starting to think that this might work. 

I cut ten 13 1/2-inch squares from each fabric, then sliced the squares twice diagonally to make quarter-square triangles.  A total of 40 triangles from each fabric.

To be continued.....

Sooner or later it had to happen.   My obsession with fabric brought me face to face with dreaded existential questions, demanding answers: 

   Why did I buy that ugly fabric?

and further:

   Why did I buy so MUCH of that ugly fabric??

and most terrifying to ponder:

   What am I ever going to do with all that ugly fabric???

Being a quilter, I knew there was only one way to slay the demon beast ... cut it into pieces!  Armed with my rotary cutter and shielded by my Omnigrid ruler, I went to do battle on the gridded green field, where all quilters must prove their worth.

To be continued ........

​I promised you a chart for using all those scrap strips, and here it is (finally)!  Click the link below this post to download the PDF.  

The chart has a grid showing how you can combine scrap sizes.  For instance, if you make 4-patch blocks from your 2-inch squares, or make 9-patch blocks from your 1 1/2-inch squares, you can easily combine them with your 3 1/2-inch squares to make bigger blocks.  (And believe me, you DO want to make bigger blocks.  As much as I like working with all those tiny bits, even I don't want to make a whole quilt from 3/4-inch strips...unless it's for a dollhouse.)  

There are so many possibilities!  And that's just talking about SQUARES.  If you cut your scraps into strips, like I do, the possible combinations multiply.  I have a gorgeous quilt in the works that started with 4-inch pinapple blocks made from 1-inch and 1 1/2-inch strips.