My only finish this week was Birds in the Air, but I didn’t buy any new fabric! Thank you for the positive comments! I can’t count most of the front, because the blocks came from other people’s stashes, but the back, solid blocks, and binding uses about 4.5 yards.
This week: + 0 yards, – 4.5 yards
This year: + 77.25 yards, – 114.5 yards
Net destashed in 2016: 37.25 yards
I’m creeping up on fifty yards!
Jaye asked if I really found joy in the things I was making, like the leaf wall hangings, or if I did it to use fabric. Yes, there’s always joy, or I wouldn’t do it. I just report the fabric usage on Sundays.
I relish handling fabric and playing with color. Sometimes a project begins with a need (in this case, a hole in my Etsy shop), or a desire to use a particular category of scraps, but it always ends up as a challenge to make something as beautiful as I can. In the case of the wall hangings, I wanted to do them quickly so I used a single, previous design. All the same, I’m very pleased with the fabrics I put together and thoroughly enjoyed the quick project and its results.
I also keep in mind Sandy’s injunction against ugly donation quilts. Yes, I often use fabrics that haven’t found a home in previous projects, but I hope I do something attractive with them. I never want to give someone a quilt that looks like Yuri’s breakfast.
And I want to continue to use as much as possible from my stash, so that I’ll feel good about replacing some of it with fresh, new fabrics!
I’m linking up to Sunday Stash at Patchwork Times.
A few months back the Twilters, of Twitter and Facebook fame, exchanged blocks in honor of our friend Frances O’Roark Dowell’s new novel, 
There was a question recently about whether we quilt in the ditch between patches. It depends, but I certainly did on this one! I used my walking foot and worked my way across both diagonals, then vertically and horizontally until all the “birds” were outlined. I also created some “faux birds” where I wanted them in some of the white areas.
I bound this with strips left from the blocks I sent and some of the left over binding from the 
This week I didn’t buy any fabric, and I did use a little. The fall wall hangings to0k a yard and a half, and I used a quarter yard for tying up the peppers in the garden.
Today I finished the little Star Wars quilt I worked on this week. It evolved a lot since my first concept, but I like the way it turned out. And I have a lot of left over fabric that I cut along the way, so there will be a sequel. I wrote a 
The back is a blue geometric, a band of of orange Fairy Frost, and a section of gray moonscape.
I quilted it in a six” grid with gray Bottom Line. Then I used NiteLite Extra Glow thread (Superior) to quilt diagonal lines in the direction of the green streaks in the fabric. I did both a long straight stitch, and #44, a “hand quilting” stitch. This would take some tweaking to really look like hand quilting, but the forward and back stitching put down lots of thread to enhance the glowing effect. I used this is a quilt I made my son long ago, so I know it last through years of use and washing.
Evening in the Garden Quilts 