No scrap left behind

Right down to the wire is customary practice for me now, but this time I can barely see the wire in my rear-view mirror.  Literally every last piece is being utilised and I'm drafting in any extra bits and bobs that catch my eye too.  Blocks I tried and rejected are now a shoo-in for this quilt.  In fact, anything goes if it fills a bit more space.

Here are a few examples: this one has much bigger triangles from the mucky green fabric with the little rows of sprouts.  It's the one thing I still have a lot of, as it was only going into the black hst blocks.  

You can also see triangles pieced from two fabrics...

 here's another one of those...

I have lots of little hourglasses, as a consequence of cutting without reference to a ruler or any form of measurement.  I'm making them bigger, like this one

 or using them in groups, like here.

I'm rather enjoying the challenge.

Coming up for air

I have been sewing.  In tiny moments, here and there.  It doesn't ever feel like much at the time, but I think that when I add it all up it does amount to something.

This is where I am up to with the hourglasses.

It doesn't look like school will be going back before September, so my aim now is to establish a routine that covers all the other stuff but builds in more coherent sewing time.  Sometimes I take this out of the box and can't really recall what I thought I would do next.  That was okay for a while but now it starts to irritate me.  Let's see if I can do better.

Next steps?

Having finished a long central column - or at least a long column I'm currently thinking will be in the centre - I am now trying to figure out what next.  

I have a few wonkier rectangles...

or I could keep going with my squares but set them so that you see the diamonds...

or I could use more of my little black blocks.  Maybe not quite like this, which seems a bit over the top to my eye, but something along these lines.

 Or, final option, is that maybe I throw the kitchen sink at it and include bits of all these ideas.  Now there's a thought to wrestle with.

A little self-knowledge

Having come up with one chunk of hourglasses that I liked, I did the obvious thing and made another.  Easy progress, you might think, and you would be right.  I could just have kept making chunks and then sewed them all together and hey presto, that would have been my quilt finished.  It was tempting but then I had a bit of a word with myself about my short attention span.  In all likelihood, I would get bored way before I had enough bits to make a whole quilt.  I've tried it before and it just hasn't worked, so best just to admit it now.

Also I still had one or two fabrics from my initial pull that felt like they belonged in this.

So I played around with borders, wondering if I might make this into a medallion, but it didn't quite work how I would have wanted.  Next step would be to chop into them, but I like to have more of an idea than that before I over-commit.  Smaller hourglasses?  Squares? In the end I decided to make just a few wee units and see if I liked them.

Hmm, these I think I can do something with.

Now I have my two chunks, with a little row of hsts between them.  That will do for now.

Time slips away...

...is what I am calling this quilt (with a nod of thanks to Mr Springsteen).  It's a name that seems appropriate on all sorts of levels at the moment.

I am managing to sneak in my bits and pieces of sewing time, just enough to keep my hand in and stop my head from exploding.  All I need to do now is the blogging bit, which I am determined to hold on to.  I apologise now to everyone who has waited ages for a response to their comments and also to everyone whose blog I would normally visit  - I will be back on track soon; just one humungous piece of real life work to get over and done and things should be back on a more even keel.

I am still hourglassing and after playing around with various layouts came up with this little block, which I liked a lot.

Then my machine started acting up.  Since it's an old one there aren't many things that can go wrong and in this case it was just the wiring in the bit that plugs the foot pedal into the machine.  That was the good news.  The bad news was that in taking it apart I managed to drop the worlds tiniest nut (and in nuts and bolts) onto the carpet.  Could we find it?  Oh no, not a hope.

Not to be discouraged I pulled this pretty little thing out of its case.

It's a funny thing - a Singer clone with Arabic script, which I bought, to be perfectly honest, because it was a lovely yellow colour (the case is the same shade as the base).  Not the swankiest machine in the world but it does a fair stitch and is seeing me through.

Detour over, I made a few more blocks and joined them together.  Now I have this.

I notice now that I have one deliberate pinwheel in here, but one has happened without any help from me too.  I love it when that sort of thing happens.

Keep well, everyone, and keep sewing.

Precious little sewing

Locked down, like most of the world, it seems.  Ah, my foolish dreams of sewing, reading, wafting around the house thinking deep thoughts and learning fifteen new languages before lunch.  In fact (of course) I am feeding more people, more of the time, clearing and cleaning more (not my forte but even I have my standards) and spending quite a lot of time supervising school work.  Sewing, not so much.  

I am grateful, though, that so far we are all healthy and hopeful that I may eventually find a rhythm that allows for use of a sewing machine and/or needle and thread.  

In the meantime, just before this all started, I did a bit of sewing that I haven't had a chance to blog.

Sadly these are mostly pictures of that phase at the beginning of a quilt when, basically, I am still a bit stuck and am making bits in the hope that light will dawn.  

I made some hourglasses - different shapes and sizes.

Then I went away, thought about it and decided that, for now at least, I didn't want to go down that route, which felt a bit predictable.  So, second start involved lots of hourglass the same size (I use the term lightly, since they are not being measured, just eyeballed).

 Once I had a few, I could play around a bit...

 or this?

Nearly, but not quite.  Still, it feels like I am groping towards something that will satisfy me.

Maybe I will start getting up half an hour earlier, or going to bed half an hour later, and carve out some time that way.

What I found in my boxes

I'm sitting here waiting to hear if our schools are going to be closed and wondering whether this blooming virus is going to result in extra sewing time or less.  I guess I'll know fairly soon.  

I have been rooting about and found quite a lot of fabrics that I think might go with my three shirts.  In a perfect world I would probably go out and look for another shirt, but this time I'm going to go with what I have. Probably one or two of these won't make it into the final quilt and probably I'll have to go away at some point and find something extra.  But for now, this will do.

I don't have any clear ideas, beyond hourglasses, so I'm going to make a few blocks to get myself started and wait for something to occur to me.