Quilts and other UFOs: Scrappiness

Along my journey as a quilter, I've accumulated billions, maybe zillions, of strips. Not just the 2 1/2" kind, but skinnies, and somewhat short. Mostly these have come from various classes, most of them taken at Empty Spools. Many of those classes have involved the random cutting of strips without the assistance of a ruler. Just me and my rotary cutter, and whatever (skinny) cut looks interesting. I have so many of these strips now that they occupy a double cabinet in my sewing space. Time to tame them.

I started by making simple strippy blocks. Random widths, lengths at least 6 1/2". If a strip was too short, I added more to it. Sometimes I used sub-cuts from strata made during the aforementioned classes. So far I have this:

My original intent was to put them together, simply alternating the orientation from horizontal to vertical - something like this:

Whoa! Too noisy, even for me (and I like a LOT of noise going on in my quilts). Well, I kept on making strippy blocks, pondering what to do. As often happens, an idea developed while doing my morning journaling. Black and white is soooo predictable, so what if I took Freddy Moran's philosophy to heart ("red is a neutral color") and went down that path?

Now look:

Still fun and loud and noisy, but now the orchestra has a conductor. Much better, yes?

The blocks have been trimmed to 6" square. They are made up of straight strips, curved strips, pieced strips, and anything else I could think of to do to the strips. At this block size, the width of the individual strip needs to be small to keep the blocks interesting. (A bunch of 6" blocks with 1", straight strips would be so very boring, don't you think?)

This has become my Monday project. Each Monday, a bunch of us gather at Cinnamon's Quilt Shoppe for a day of sewing, chatting and cameraderie. It can be such a pain to decide what the heck to work on every week, so I've settled on this for my Monday project for the next few months. I'm not sure how big the eventual quilt will become, so for now I'll just keep making blocks. I have a long way to go before decisions will be needed. I'll keep you posted.

Never having been the type of person that has one thing going on at a time, here's a peek at what's currently up on the design wall:

This is not just one project - it's just a glimpse of what's up there providing me with inspiration at the moment. Oh the stories behind the majority of those pieces! But that's for another day.

Stay tuned!

Below are a few pics of where I was at the end of April. I sure enjoyed myself! Thanks, Penny, for the trip.

Pacific Grove. Home is where the heart is, so that home for me. I don't live there, but my heart is there, for sure. I attended the final 2015 Empty Spools session, taking a class from Jacquie Gering. It was great.