Back in July, I looked at my strip scraps and realized I had an inordinate number of brown scraps, but whenever I have used brown before, it’s made a BORING quilt. Don’t want to do THAT again.

Then I saw a picture on Facebook of a quilt using brown with touches of red. Now THAT sounded interesting.

I made a few prototype blocks to see how they looked…..

And I could see there were many possibilities with this design.

Then, life got busy, and it was relegated to a UFO Box….

Now, when I got ready to work on it again, I made a whole series of videos about my excellent idea for piecing the strip sets without wasting tons of fabric.

BUT, between moving to a new phone AND to a new computer, those videos have vanished into thin air!! Actually, they are probably floating somewhere out there in the ether-world, but I can’t find them!

So, I will tell you that it was cut from strip sets….

….. and show you the finished quilt top……

I had a lot of fun moving the blocks around, trying to come up with a design I loved.

To make my “future self” happy, I went ahead and put together a simple backing…..

…using up MORE of my brown fabrics.

AND, I even made the binding….

Now it resides in an empty drawer, awaiting motivation to get it quilted…..

It was a fun project to work on because, for the most part, it was mindless sewing, and that was EXACTLY what I needed!

…………………………………………………………….

“Let’s Get Scrappy is about how to decide, not about what to make.”

Let’s Get Scrappy is an on-demand online course that helps quilters overcome decision fatigue and finally make sense of their overflowing scrap bins. With four hours of step-by-step video instruction, you’ll learn simple systems for organizing, piecing, and pressing your scraps—so you can stop overthinking and start sewing beautiful, coordinated quilts with confidence and joy.

Yesterday I had one of those days….. there were things that I SHOULD be doing (finishing the videoing for my upcoming course), but I desperately wanted to be creative in some way!!

So, I decided to split the day…..create in the morning and video in the afternoon!!

But what was I going to create??

Was I going to continue working on this piece…..

Was I going to start quilting on one of the THREE quilts that are waiting for some time under the needle?

NO….. I was going to start something new!!

It began on Friday as I watched a video about string piecing. Then there was this glimpse of a strip quilt made with mostly brown fabrics but adding pops of red.

I couldn’t get it out of my mind and kept also thinking about all of the brown strips that I had sitting in my drawers….

So….off I toddled into the studio.

I started out by making a strip set….

….cut it into squares and then sliced on the diagonal…..

I added a red strip to the cut side…..

Now it was time to make another, smaller strip set, and cut the triangles out from the side….

I sewed the two triangles together….

And ended up with this fun block….

I made several of them and started playing with layouts….

This is DEFINITELY a design that I will play with more, but for now…..

…into a project box!!

I kept to my plan and spent the afternoon working on a video, but sadly when it started downloading, there was an error and I lost what I had done. VERY BIG SIGH!!

Oh well, I will re-do it today and it will be even better!!

So, that is what I do when I “GOTTA” create…..how about you?