Feeling Kind'a Crumby

I am joining a "crumb along" over at Jo's Country Junction. See the pretty button over there on the right side bar?  KaChow! I added a button to my blog without (too much) technical assistance! Go me!

This will be my first quilt-along type activity! I hope I can keep up... I tend to quilt in spurts. You know, one can only ignore household responsibilities for so long before they suck you back into the vortex! I am not exactly starting from square one on this (no pun intended) as I got the crumb bug back when Jo was first working on her own crumb quilt earlier this year. I started making 4" squares literally out of my scrap baskets. I had gone through the bins trying to weed out the small from the medium and larger scraps. The small ones ended up in a shoe box; actually overflowing out of a shoe box onto the floor near my machine's foot pedal. About that same time I was working on some exchange blocks that had a lot of seams and I used the crumbs as a leader/ender type of thing. Well, when they began to come together they pretty much took over and I couldn't stop myself. Victoria over at Bumble Beans Inc calls this kind of thing "made fabric" and *claims* that is can be done "15 minutes of fun" at a time... I'm here to tell you, it takes me longer. I just can't stop! I finally decided to cut it off at 4" squares to give me shorter time goals... 'just one more 4" block' takes less time than 'one more 6" block', see. (OK, stop laughing) I ended up, after some very late nights of "just one more..." with something like 45 blocks. At that point I stuck them in a shoe box and left town; always a sure fire way to break a habit or cure an obsession. 

I may stay with the 4" blocks, I may make the 4" ones into wonky stars and make more blocks that finish the size of the stars so I can do an alternating layout... I will see how it goes. I do need to decide on a unifying color. Jo has her solid red, I think mine might be the bit of gold in many of the blocks. I will have to be more conscious about adding it now. I may also add some structure to some of them, like Jo's tiny stars and flying geese here and there. More experimenting, more fun (and more late nights - only the sewing room is now a bedroom for an 11 year old so maybe not). This could get interesting. Do you want to use up some of your crumbs? Check it out, follow the button, 'crumb along'!