Oreos and Milk

A Saga

Do you, like me, have trouble getting your Oreos to last as long as your milk?

Or maybe it's chocolate cake, or apple pie ... but you know how it goes.  You finish the cookies/cake/pie and there's still a bit of milk left.  So you get more of said treat, then run out of milk.

My quilting is much like the Oreo-milk situation -- I need a bit more to finish a quilt, make too much, then I have too many leftovers so I upcycle them into anther project and it all starts again!

This saga begins in 2014.  I was scheduled to teach at Peg Bingham's Fall Quilt Camp.  One of the classes was Wink & a Smile.  The pattern shows the quilt in 30s fabrics and I was using a friend's quilt in brights to promote the class.  When I taught I always liked to show alternative fabrics as inspiration, so I stopped at Whittle's in Bowling Green, KY on my way to West Virginia to pick up a few half yards of something I could use for demonstration purposes.

I selected a lovely Vintage Farmhouse collection by Kim Diehl for Henry Glass.

Wink & a Smile

I think I only got a quarter yard of each piece, certainly no more than a half yard, and proceeded to cut them all into 2-1/2" strips for the 9-patches.  I had no clue how many I would need; I just needed something to demo and also something to work on during the 2-day class.

That quilt is yet to be finished -- story of my life -- but I had so many excess 9-patches that I was able to throw together this quilt, recently back from the LAQ (yet to be bound):

Chexx Mix

In order to get the proper mix of light and dark backgrounds with the fabrics I had on hand, I had to make a few more 9Ps.  I decided to make the remaining 2-1/2" strips into 9Ps so there were STILL more than 20 9-patch blocks left over, not to mention partial, unfinished blocks.

I asked my loyal readers to make suggestions on what I should do.  In the end I decided to run the excess pieces end-to-end for an inner border, but I was afraid I didn't have enough to go around the quilt I was planning so I used some excess strips to make stripsets which I cut into twosies, then made foursies.  And while I was at it I made a few more 9-patch blocks!

Bear in mind this was the last thing I had planned to work on this week.  It just kinda fell off the shelf and wouldn't go back.  Does that ever happen to you?  I just wanted to do something quick to get it out of the way so my plan was to do a straight set with 2-1/2" sashing so that my scrappy inner border would fit without any exotic math.

I had seven rows of six blocks sashed together and started working on the horizontal sashing.  BORING!  Even though this is likely to be a charity quilt, I just couldn't make myself continue with something so uninspired.  

What if I set it on point?  Well, of course, that has involved some disassembly and reorganization.  This is the current status:

I tried to use the finished rows as-is, but in the end I've had to break apart some of the rows.  

The excess 9-patches are going on the back or they may become hot pads.  I PROMISE!