Peppermint Candy

I went into the sewing room on Saturday with no particular project in mind other than trying to bring order out of chaos; since early May, I've had multiple projects going on with attendant deadlines, and messes had gotten out of hand. I made some serious headway in rearranging piles and doing some serious thinking about projects. Wanting to do something fun, I pulled out a bag of scraps from the bureau. This bag was given me back at the March quilt guild meeting by a friend I will simply call "Enabler." Enabler is the person currently in charge of trying to get people to take piles of donated fabrics home and bring back at least finished quilt tops, if not completely done quilts. Well, at the meeting in question, Enabler came up to me with a grin on her face. "I have some scraps that are right up your alley, Liz! They're leftovers from a project I just got done. I KNOW you can do something with these." Here they are:

Okay. I was sunk. I took them home and put them in the aforementioned drawer. It seems that there were several blocks in this bag; blocks that looked like these:

There was also one that looked like this:

When I got this one on the wall and measured it against the other blocks, I added that last round - the one with the ferny fabric on one side and the deep magenta on the other side. After moving the blocks around a bit, I hit on this general plan:

I didn't take pictures of the yellow/green blocks, but there were also several blocks with white centers and yellow/green surrounds. When I got this up, I realized that I had a really fun layout, and I also realized that I needed to make a lot more blocks. I started ransacking the stash for super-pale yellows and greens so that I could make more of those blocks. I also made up a bunch more green and pink blocks. Here is the current layout:

I really like the way this looks. I'm going to have to trim a half inch off each side of the log cabin block in order to make it fit right. By my math, once I sew these blocks together, I'll have a top that is roughly 40" x 50". I may have to dye up some super pale greenish yellow fabric in order to make more rows or I could just use the pale olive green with some pale yellow I have in the "to-be-dyed" pile. I want to think about this a bit more.

There's no big artistic statement here, but it sure felt good to be moving blocks around on a wall again.

Finally, there's some nonsense going on in my world right now, and I've been reciting portions of this piece to myself over and over as a way of keeping sane.  I first discovered this when I was a teenager and remember using a long bus ride as an opportunity to memorize it. It has been a comfort and aid to me in a great many circumstances.