Still here

I am still here and about all I have been able to get around to on the computer is to check my email, my bank debit and credit cards, and the blogs that I follow. The daily life stuff seems to have a longer list and it all takes me longer to accomplish. 

 When I have time I am in my sewing room making more chaos out of chaos. That is not to say I haven't accomplished anything. I gave my grandson's wife some things and I hope that now that I have more things sorted out she will choose some scraps for improv piecing. I have an over abundance of those. 

Restoring order to my sewing room faces 2 big obstacles, interruptions and me getting sidetracked by something I find in the stuff I am sort. The interruptions cause me to lose focus and to lose track of where I left off.

This is my design wall as it was this morning. In the past several weeks I stuck things up on the wall that caught my interest as I went through my boxes. Some of my odd blocks are up there and some are in my parts department box. The parts department category is borrowed from "Collaborative Quilts" book by Gwen Marston and Freddy Moran. There are also some pieces of fabric that I picked up from someone else's scraps and one pink improv block which proved to be a distraction as I combed through the smallish pink scraps (that I was sorting) and began to audition pieces for another pink block.  I kind of solved the distraction problem by keeping the door to my room open and pushed tight against the wall so it covered those blocks.

I found this 12 block piece that was a leftover from my wall quilt for my boring, everything all white,  bathroom. I have no plans to use this or do anything with it, I gave the first BR quilt away when we moved and it no longer fit, I  had blocks left from the quilt and I made a four piece set of small wall hangings to fit that bathroom. After we moved again I put them on a hanger and they hang in a closet with a bunch of seasonal wall hangings.

You can see my first bathroom wall quilt and my 4 piece set of bathroom quilt pieces here

So even though I have no plans for this I became fixated on a block that had a center that looked all wrong, It was too pale and washed out. I made the mistake of sticking  it on the wall  where it was not out of sight or forgotten. Then I spent 3 days fussing with it on and off.  

This is what it looks like now. Retrofitting the center of a improv block isn't the easies thing to do.  First, I messed around with pulling fabrics from already sorted and packed scraps. Then I removed the offending center and stitched a rectangle and fussed around with the orientation. When I got it the way I thought I wanted it, I cut it to fit and stitched it in. That meant opening up parts of seams to allow me to stitch the new seams. Then I had to fix the seams I opened. I hope I got them all.

 

This is the new center. I don't  have a photo of the old one because I lost it and I surely hope it is not going to pop up and ask to put into something else. I hope it is in the dog bed scraps. Though I have no plans for this 12 block piece I am satisfied to have fixed it,  please don't anyone ask me why.  I am putting it out of sight and I will be getting back to sorting and clearing out. 

I have made some progress and though the end is not in sight I can look at some empty boxes and some boxes that have organized strips and small pieces organized by color. There is a box or partial impro blocks and a box with sets of things that go together in some way. 

I can see a way to move forward.  As I go long I am becoming more and more inclined to pass most of this stuff on to someone else.