Experimenting

 I'm trying to find or develop ideas for projects PCQ's Community Service committee can easily kit up for our charity sew days, using the stash we have available. The stash skews older with a lot of darkish colors, not much in the way of popular brights. We also have a lot of Christmas, novelty, and two bins of florals. 

So I'm experimenting with ideas. I tried to pull a palette from the floral bins for a project using 20 fat quarters. I tried for a consistent soft palette and pulled prints that had a lot of rose or dusty pink in them, and anything that might remotely harmonize. 

I also pulled a few blenders in rose, seafoam, and cream, plus I ended up supplementing with a few of my own floral FQs. 

My husband took one look at this project (he very rarely comments on my projects) and said it looks very "old lady." He hopes I'm not keeping it. He said his great grandmother would have loved it. Okay, I get it, it's not a contemporary look, but it'll go to hospice and someone will be able to use it. Maybe someone in their 90s...

The piecing involves cutting the FQs into large squares, then strips of varied widths, randomly sewing the strips together, crosscutting the resulting blocks, and randomly sewing the parts into final blocks. The idea is that the more mixed up the prints are in each block, the better. 

So, will this concept work for our stash? I don't know. Maybe the idea works better when a single designer collection is used so the result is more cohesive.  

I'll have a better idea of whether this will work for us when this top is done and I look again at what we have in the bins in the sewing room. I'm meeting with the committee chair next week to talk about ideas for next year. 

In other quilty news, look at my design wall. It's clean!!! And not just empty, it's de-linted. It took several lint roller sheets to get it completely free of threads, dust and lint. 

There's a reason for cleaning it off. Come back Friday for more on that. 

Linking up with Small Quilts and Doll Quilts