A little lesson in "how I think"

I know that some of you have wondered how my mind works. I can’t really say “how it does” - but I can show you a situation in something I am trying to do.

I’ve got several projects going on at once each day - including going through the “stuff” in my daughters’ old bedroom - it has become the repository of all misc. things - and it’s time to get back in there and reorganize. I have things for fidget mats in there and a bunch of cut up shirts - and piled up quilts, etc. It’s quite a mess - but I’m tackling it at least 15 min. a day just to get a handle on it.

I went in there and I found a zipper bag of these cool pieces of fabric. I decided to just grab them, bring them out and go ahead and use them this year.

What happened is in 2015 when we bought that lady’s stash, she had some smaller pieces of cut up things - they were leftovers from a scrubs factory, I guess. As a result of that, the pieces are kind of long and skinny.

But this particular batch, when I measured the wider pieces, they are 5” wide and I was delighted! That meant I could cut some of them into 5” squares. And so I did. Here is what the pieces looked like that were 5” wide.

Then I had some that are not 5” wide - they look like this. Not sure how to use these yet. For now I’ve put them to the side.

But in the meantime, I have 66 5” pieces, but I can come up with up to about 7 more - for a total of about 73, 5” squares. If I use a 8x9 layout that would be 72. I have that many.

But they are small. What to do with them? Once you sew a 5” square, it becomes only 4.5”. These are adorable kitties. Earlier today I worked up something I thought I might do. I wasn’t thinking of making a bed sized quilt out of it simply because possibly people wouldn’t actually USE a bed sized quilt out of cute cats. But a lap size, yes - lots of us would like to wrap kitties around us when we are cold.

So I’m still thinking. A lot of the “process” of what goes on in my mind takes a bit of time. Sometimes things go on the back burner while I do other, more pressing things.

So let me show you the first two ideas I have. Once I realized that the first one was very very similar to one of my quilts I finished not very long ago, I am not sure about doing it - though, frankly, I still like it. It ends up being pretty big - and only uses 30 squares. The squares that start out being 5” square end up being a 9” square by the time I add a frame, and then all those half square triangles for the border of the block.

Then, I thought, I can always just do another shadow quilt using the little squares and putting on a 1.5” shadow. It would make the blocks a 6” block, which is a bit bigger size. That would look like this.

Of course because I want to just use this one fabric it will get tedious if I make them all the same. A little variety would be nice such as in the first one. So I’m still thinking. The fabric is so cute that I’ve decided to just “use it”. I hate to always push my super cute/cool fabric to the side and work with strips.

But I’m still thinking. I will play with some other ideas and probably show you what I’m up to with these in a couple more days.

At the moment, the squares are sitting on my table. I think I’m hoping that if I leave them out, a brilliant idea will come to me! (and it might). However, often the “brilliant” ideas come as a result of hard work on the computer using the Electric Quilt program. I am really not good at visualizing without some the visual help that drawing it out and then taking a peek at what it is going to look like as a finished top does. I know many people can just sketch things out on a piece of graph paper and it comes out great. That’s not now my brain works.

So, here’s the first glimpse into my brain and how I make a decision about what I want to do with a certain set of fabrics.

Hope it helps those of you who are curious!

Have a great day wherever you are reading this!

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