Nearly a clean slate

     I don't do well with unfinished quilting projects.  Blue hourglasses, Purple Crazy Piecing and Blue HST have been bothering me for some time but I haven't done much to fix that problem.  Until the last week.  Hourglasses got pieced first, and then the purple one.  Finally I dug the blue squares out of the box, finished trimming those already sewn and turned the rest of the squares into HST yesterday.

     By late this afternoon, with the help of a wonderful spouse and a nice mother, I had the quilt top finished.  Color placement was nearly all random other than trying to make sure I didn't pair up too many dark squares at any time.  It wasn't until I had the blocks of 16 squares that I bothered to pay attention to placement.  Random is good.  Knowing that I would manage to mix up the order if I were to carefully place all 288 of the squares before stitching makes random sewing totally acceptable.  

     I wasn't sure what I was going to do with this quilt as I was piecing it together today, but as soon as I assembled it, I decided that I was going to keep it.  I really haven't kept many of my recent quilts.  The flannel backing I recently purchased for another project will now give me the backing without needing to purchase any more.  My mother was nice enough to give/loan me one of her batting packages so I could postpone the purchase of additional batting.  

     And although this quilt could be described as a bit chaotic, I calmed down other aspects of sewing life by sorting through all my bins and drawers and putting fabric away where it belongs.  I've been looking at bins with random bits in them and it has been irritating me but I feel much better looking at the more organized chaos of fabric bins.  So on the first day of the new year, I feel much better about nearly having cleared the slate of unfinished quilting projects.  Now to start working on those projects I intended to make but haven't gotten around to yet.