Keepin' It Real

If you read my post from last night, you know I was gripped with a burning desire to make this quilt top after supper, and stay up until it was finished. Well, I did so, but it was a challenge. Not a challenge to design it myself, but a challenge to find enough space on my cutting table to make the silly thing. It has been so long since I've sewn regularly that my cutting table was a shambles. Here is the before...

Scary--isn't it? I think so. Just keepin' it real.

On the right (in front) among other things is a stack of quilt magazines, my red scrap bin, a bolt of brown (what was that used for?). There are scraps of trimmings from I-can't-remember-what on the 18" x 24" green mat in the center. To the left is another motley crew of I-have-no-idea-where-those-came-froms. Enough to make a grown woman cry. Oh--that would be me.

But I was determined to machine quilt my little Octagonal Fall top today. In order to do that, I'd need to lie it down flat somewhere and cut backing and batting. I needed to clean up that table. But being a quilter, I could not just throw away all the scraps. They could most likely be used in a future project. So I painstakingly sorted them by color into my "scrap boxes", aka plastic shoe boxes by colors (reds, blues, greens, and all the others--4 boxes total).

Like a breath of fresh air...

That's what I am talking about. The quilt top has been quilted and the binding is sewn to the front. We have liftoff!

~Joan