Progress! I finally cut all the pieces and discovered I have enough fabric to allow for a mistake or two and options on finishing off the top and bottom of the quilt.
Picture seems a little fuzzy and the quilt is on its side on my wall but you get the idea of how it will look. I should have a flimsy by next week if I can find a few hours this weekend to work on it. Once I cobble together a backing, I can move on to piecing the selvedge blocks together.
I've been playing with different fabric combinations on the inkblots quilt. When I first changed the layout and started working with all the greens, I drew myself a grid and colored in what I thought might work. Then I started cutting fabric and got to work.
Now having added in some more green fabric I was having difficulties working with all the multiple pieces on the wall. I decided to go back to my paper grid, but instead of coloring in the spaces with inaccurate colors of greens (I only have three different green crayons), I cut up little pieces of the background fabric to play with. Worked a lot faster than the wall (although I had to make sure not to sneeze!).
Wow - I haven't worked on a quilt for a while. Inkblots has been on the wall for weeks but didn't go anywhere. I had changed the layout and started to cut fabric. I had enough yardage, but two of the greens were much closer in shade on the wall than they had been on the table.
I like the color and I want to stick with this layout, so I went to Swanson's for some short yardage that might go with it.
The last of August and September have blown by. Right now it seems I'm doing nothing but trying to catch up!
The wildlife stopped eating my black-eyed susans long enough for them to bloom. I love the variety of colors from yellow to deep orange. My volunteer sunflowers had some nifty shading, too.
I spent a chunk of time working on our out-of-control yard. We had someone come in and whack back all the brush around the edges of the yard. I had no idea how much it had encroached - the yard looks so much bigger. I also pulled out several bushes, roots and all. I then tackled the side garden which was neglected since we moved in: I removed copious weeds, ferns and lily of the valley that had started to choke the ornamental grass planted there.
In the last several months I picked up a bunch of buttons between a Freecycle post and my mother's donation to Swanson's Fabrics. I sorted through them and kept a bunch of ones I liked. Some I have plans for. Others I just like. Then there's the handful I set aside to add to a quilt.
Swirling Spheres was a Project Quilting submission back in 2025 that featured buttons. I had envisioned more buttons on it, but had neither the time nor the buttons to do that.
I fixed that.
My inkblot layout has been on the wall for months (see photo below). I bought green fabric for the background over a month ago. Next step was to start cutting and sewing. So imagine my surprise after cutting a few pieces I stopped.
Nope. This wasn't working.
I dug through my orphaned blocks for inspiration and discovered a handful of blue and green four-patches that I don't even remember putting together. Must have been some experiment that failed to launch. There were enough pieces to make the bag with two four-patches left over. Perfect.
The pieced sides by themselves could easily pull apart so I backed them with some fabric and ran some wavy lines of stitching over them to hold them all together. Then I stitched the sides and the bottom and rolled over a sleeve on top for the string. I bound the inside seams so there were no raw edges.