Cool Threads and Everything Else

I am working on a Pensacola Quilt Guild challenge; each quilter was given a 5″ square. The challenge is that in the quilt you make, you must only use the colors you find in that 5″ square. Actually, there were a lot of colors to work with, or at least, there were a lot of colors I work with often. I can’t show you the quilt yet. 🙂

When I went to quilt it, I had to go through all four boxes of threads. Four boxes you ask?

My Kuwaiti quilting friend helped me organize my quilting room; we went to Daiso, a Japanese dollar-store like shop, and found just the right boxes, two very flat boxes for “shiny threads” and two larger boxes for piecing threads and flatter, more matte threads.

Everyone has his or her own system. My machine quilting threads are Hot or Cool; cool mostly referring to colors of the sea, I seem to do a lot of those. My piecing threads are Colors of the Sea and Everything Else, LOL.

Or at least that’s what I thought until I started to write this entry. Looking at all my threads in these photos, I discovered that they are all either blue/green/purple or they are everything else. I guess it shows me where my priorities are. 🙂

Stash Reorganization For the New Year

I usually do this the first week of the New Year, but I got a little behind trying to make sure I finished White Ties and Tails. I have a new project in mind, and I need to get started, it’s a guild challenge with a deadline, but I can’t work as long as my area is in disorder, and it is. I have some folding and sorting and putting away to do so I can find the fabrics and tools that I need when I need them.

It takes a full day to get things in order. I took a photo because the stash won’t stay in order for very long. And no, this isn’t all of it. There is a plastic tub of ‘shiny fabrics’ and another of batiks and a smaller one of Kona solids. Now I have a better idea of what I have to work with. 🙂

Finishing White Ties and Tails

Well, life intruded, like visitors and Thanksgiving and Christmas and other obligations. I was also trying to figure out where I wanted to go with the quilt; there was a lot of bare space.

Finally I made some decisions, a little at a time. I wanted to add some color in the center, and I wanted to add the ties and hearts to the cats:

I wanted something to give the quilt a little directionality, so that if it were hung, there would be a top and a bottom:

And I found a backing I love; a Javanese Bali print my Grammy friend and I found in the small dark Souk al Ahmad, in Doha. I bought like eight of them – they are wonderful for backings, maybe not wide enough but I cut and pasted:

And this is the finished quilt, made for the New Year’s baby who actually showed up the 5th of January:

And, LOL, I notice I have seem to be attracted to doing black and white quilts when the weather gets cold. I wonder if I will be doing a floral quilt around April?