Empty spaces

It must be some sort of law of physics, that any available and 'naked' horisontal surface, will fill up in no time flat if left unattended for more than 5 seconds.
Showed you my nice, ready-to-work-on table day before yesterday. Well, yesterday I did laundry. DH thrifted a sack-full of table-linens a while back. Lovely stuff. White, damask- and jaquard-woven stuff, lots of napkins, two sets (each of 14 or 16) embroidered with monograms.

Most of it has been laundered and ironed for the longest time, but ... during my marathon clearing, cleaning and washing day yesterday, the last load of the white linens surfaced, and ... now my table looks like this. Again.

Time for some ironing, I think, and then maybe, just maybe, I'll reclaim my 'empty table' before going to bed tonight.

Hello again - Cinderella'ing

Well. That was a very long silence, but ... life has been happening. Life and not much (any) stitching.
Excuses out of the way now :-)
I hope I'm back on the block now.
And I'm ready to get back to some stitching.
Problem is, before I can stitch, I need a place to work, and - as always - when things backslide, they backslide, and one of the first places to suffer, and last places to be rescued, is my sewing-room, and ... the table.

SO, nothing for it. Cinderella needs to go on duty (hence the 'Cinderella'ing of the title of this post). You know, Cinderella went to the ball, but before that, she had to clear and clean and scrub and sort and .... So ... yesterday was Cinderella-duty, i.e. Cinderella outside of the ballroom. And just so that you'll know I'm not pulling your leg, here are the pictures to prove, that I actually did something :

Table before I started
After 15 minutes of Cinderella'ing
After another 15 minutes of Cinderella'ing
This morning (and yes, I moved the 'puter in here, since DS is writing his end-of-term thesis in 'the office' and cannot for the life of him keep is mouth shut, and I need peace and quiet to work, so ...)
The remaining problem identified : Piles of neatly folded and lovely, lovely fabric that has no place to go. As you can see, I seriously need to get some stitching going ;-)

Feeling organized ...

Feeling organized is *always* a dangerous thing with me.
Feeling organized AND being on the last leg of finishing a project is a killer-combination. Occasionally one has to give in to temptation ... or one does not deserve it !
And all of this translates into the fact, that today a PIG has been dug out of the closet, and is being experimented on ... oh, and to avoid any humane societies (which - strangely (considering the name) - has to do with animals) becoming upset about my experimenting with PIGs, let me hasten to assure you that these are the textile variant : Project In Grocerybag.

This particular PIG consists of gorgeous South African Indigoes, lots of different US shirtings. The original plan was to make Bear's Paw blocks, but ... I reconsidered that. I'm thinking that something excruciatingly simple is in order, to show off the indigoes properly, and ... here are the experiments so far :


And then, in order to not make more scraps, I'm not only cutting up the remnants as I go, I am joining them into small (2" finished) and medium-size (4" finished) 4-patches :


*And* I even have the 4-patch "kits" gathered in a tin, pin through the f, to be leaders-enders the Bonnie Hunter way :-) And, eventually, they will possibly be a doll to lap-size quilt :


Yes. I am feeling very organized today ... good thing I'm not showing pictures of the floor :-)

Organizing !

OK. Scraps have now been dealt with. And the box of ironed and cut scraps is overflowing.

They used to fit into the box in the back of the picture (to your left) , but ... not any more.
The front bit is a box with 2" squares. Next row is a bag with 4" squares, destined to become a Tumbler-quilt (in the fullness of time) and 1 ½" squares, ready to be made into tiny scrappy 4-patches. In the back, the 2½, 3, 4 and 5" squares.

And I will *not*, NOT get a bigger box !!!

After cutting and sorting and generally dealing with (most of) my scraps, I decided it was time that my sewing-boxes (yes, plural) got a work-out.
First empty 3 boxes (on the right) :



Then empty the "Present handwork on the couch"basket and the "loose change" carry-along bags as well.
And we have a fine old mess on what was, 2 minutes previously, a nice, fairly empty table.


BUT less than 10 minutes of focused attention brought the mess down to this (on the right) ! There really was a table and a cutting mat beneath all the ... stuff :-)
And even that got cleared away, as I gathered everything necessary into the 3 nice boxes I have
To the left is the one for hand-quilting (I bought the candy for the box).

To the right / below, is the box for applique. Yes. I've taken off the lids, so you can see them. That's what makes these boxes seriously nice :-)

And finally, below left, my present work on the couch basket with the hand-sewing tools necessary to piece or - as is the case right now - to handsew a binding down.







All in all, not a bad result of today's organizational zeal ... even if I do say it myself

Scraps !

I'm in scrap-mood.
Forced on me by the need to find / make a binding for Allsorts. I only have two repeats left to quilt of the border-design, after which it will desperately need a binding.
I ordered some fabrics to test, but none of them really worked with the quilt. SO, last ditch effort is making a striped binding, comprising of all the batiks that make up the applique's.
Which necessitates my cutting the strips first.
As luck would have it, the bag of miscellaneous batik-cuts, used for the applique, had not yet been sorted or cut into squares and strips, so ... that's happening now.
And as I work, I realise some things.
First : It is a joy to go through fabrics you have used, that you know and that you love. There is no sadness in cutting up the last itty bit of a scrap of fabric that has been used for several different projects. Only joy.
And remembrance.
And the knowledge, that when next I fondle this little bit, it will be because it goes into yet another quilt, and yet again tells me stories of the diverse usages that one piece of fabric can have.
ANYway. This is what my table looks like right now.
Slightly messy, but still workable.
To the right, the strips that will be turned into a binding. At least I hope the monster-stripe that will result will work as a binding. If not, I'm up the creek with that.
Top right : the cut-offs. The bits that cannot be used for anything even remotely sensible.
Centre left : a strip of the first batik I ever bought, and two tiny squares of a yellow that has had a long and productive existence in my stash, being used for Jane-style hexagons, a RowJane, a Baltimore medallion and Allsorts. Now being put into the scrap-box, where the ironed and cut scrap-squares go to live, until something is made of them.

Right now I'm cutting strips from the red-pink colour-family, and many of the pieces tell stories about quilts and freindships made.

I think there might be a lesson to me somewhere. Something about not being afraid to use my fabric to the last thread ... something about not hoarding ...