red and #5

Another month has begun, so another month of challenge assignments has me scrambling and scratching my head, but also excited!

The UFO number for the month is #5 - that's my APQ Blog Buddies Swap Quilt!

I've added a skinny black border and then a wider, funky floral print border a while ago.  (Sorry, too dark at this point for additional photos.)  Probably not long after I took this photo.  But into the Closet of Shame it went at that point.  I was one of the first to get this together as a top from my swap-mates, but a few of them have put me to shame with having finished their tops entirely since then.

It's about time this one got quilted and finished and I can show it off, so onto the list it went.  It's another that I cringed a little when I saw its number come up, but I want it done, so now I just have to figure out HOW!

Today the hubby and I trekked to see my parents.  They'd purchased a new dining room table and chairs and we have a truck...  While the boys loaded the new set and set it up in the house and hauled the old set to Goodwill, my mom and I stayed well out of the way - fabric shopping!

I chose these fabrics for the back of my swap quilt:

The quilt measures 80"x80", so I needed about 6.25 yards for the back to be big enough to make it easy to longarm.  The stamps fabric - end of the bolt - was only 5 yards.  That's okay for MOST of the quilt, but I knew I needed a bit more.  And you all know by now I have a dot problem, so when I found the peach that matched AND had dots...well, that was the end of the looking.  (Despite my mom's efforts to keep making suggestions!)

There were so many fabrics to choose from, but I love this one because it reminds me of travel and these blocks travelled from all over the world to my mailbox to make this quilt, so I think it's perfect!

But I also found this:

I bought the end of this bolt, too, about 7 yards, assuming it will be enough for my science geek quilt.  While the front is lime green and orange and grey - and this is a bit darker - I couldn't pass it up!  So I'll be ready when that number is called - all the fabrics have already been through the wash!  (I think I've set a record for number of loads of laundry washed here this weekend - I think after these two I'm up to seven!)

And then there's the Rainbow Scrap Challenge color - RED!

I don't love red, but it's a staple color, so I have a fair amount.  I first pulled my stash pile of reds.  And then I decided that the VERY messy box of strips that were too wide to toss out, but too narrow to leave in the stash NEEDED to be sorted.  It was a mash-up of flannel scraps, leftover block parts and strips.  What was I thinking?

So I sat down on my newly vacuumed floor (thankyouverymuch to myself for cleaning the house Friday night while the hubby went to see a silly movie with our nephew!) and sorted those strips:

None of the piles are huge (though pink seems to be towering over the others?), but they're sorted.  Not pressed and tidy, but sorted.  (And I decided that the flannel strips - not large enough to back a dolly quilt - should be tossed.  GASP!  Yep, I threw away fabric!)

These were all mashed into a single shoebox.  I decided they needed to be in their own shoe boxes until their color comes up.  Off to gather all the shoe boxes I'd been hoarding for a few years...

Don't judge me.  These are truly a collection from a few years of collecting.  And they're not ALL from MY shoes.  But what I do buy, I often actually wear out due to my job!

The reds were set aside with the red stash for the rainbow scrap challenge pull.  The purple and turquoise were added to the other leftover scraps from the last two months' rainbow scrap challenge leftovers and the remaining ones were assigned boxes:

SO much better!

And the final destination of the leftover strips will look like this:

This is after I've made string blocks and cats.  And decided which pieces are just too small and purged.  (I donate scraps of cotton fabrics to Charitable Union through my guild and they sell them - we're not sure where they go, but some have theorized paper-making?)  These will hang out and be the start of new string blocks since I'm trying to not use the same fabric twice in those blocks.

And where's the red you ask?

I have a few places where fabrics are stashed - a few places where bags of scraps that were given to me hang out, in addition to my storage closet.  But I'm trying with this challenge to gather them all as each color is announced and put them all in once place.  So this challenge is helping me clean my sewing room, too!

Now I'm ready to sew some cats.  And maybe another of those dreaded curved blocks (in red) for the block challenge.  She said she needs 64 of those units that I made...four of those units makes a block.  I don't think she's going to have enough for a quilt even if we all make four - there's only about 10 of us participating, but I guess I can maybe make one or two more...maybe...

Next Saturday I have a one-day quilt retreat, so I think this coming week will be more about preparing for that (deciding what I want to take!) than sewing, but we'll see.  This month has a lot going on each weekend...the following weekend is my quilt guild's annual quilt show and the weekend after that we celebrate a nephew turning 3.  But I'll get some quilting in and try to blog about it, too!  I gotta make those challenge deadlines!

Happy quilting,
Katie