After yesterday’s inactivity, today I’ve got my energy back and I feel rested and raring to go. I guess my body just needed a quiet down day and I was lucky enough to be able to take one.

All the looking at my stash that I ‘ve done over the last two days made me realize that there are an awful lot of small pieces of very old, occasionally ugly and not very exciting fabrics in there that I would really like to use up. A lot of them have been hanging around for the last 20 years or more – especially the small prints. I don’t want to throw them away – but I would really like to get them out of my stash and into a quilt top. (To make space for new and more exciting things 🙂 ).

One quilt that I’ve been hankering after making for ages is Bonnie Hunter’s Cathedral Stars. The instructions and photos are on her website – right here. Bonnie’s quilts are always great stashbusters – and scrap quilts to boot. At heart I’m a bit of an old homesteader and I love traditional quilts. Don’t get me wrong, I get as tempted as the next person by the gorgeous fabric collections on offer today (I guess you might have realized that!), but I do honestly get more of a kick out of using the odds and ends in the stash cupboard than out of putting together something from a beautiful co-ordinated set of fat quarters. I guess I’m just funny like that!

So I’ve jumped right in and started making the 305 4-patches that the quilt needs. That’s a heck of a lot of 4-patches, but Bonnie’s quick piecing techniques certainly speed things up and I’m using loads of uglies along the way. At this stage I’m using jewel tones and white – both of which I have in abundance.

This is lovely ‘use it up while listening to the radio’ work, which can’t go far wrong – and so far is immensely satisfying. I think this is probably one of those pick me up, put me down projects that will take me ages, but which are always nice to have on hand when I want to sew but not be too challenged with fabric choices and placement.

So, 305 4-patches here I come….

Helen

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 10th, 2011 at 11:29 am and is filed under Quilting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.