UFOs, WIPs, Leftovers.......and a Little Snow

For the last couple of weeks, I've felt sew free to create in my studio.  Wow!  For the last six-eight months, all of my work in my studio has been professionally driven, sew this is such a nice change of pace for me.

The first thing I created was a new messenger bag/purse for ME, which I already blogged about a couple weeks ago.  After that, I got down to the business of trying to clean up my studio a little bit.

I finally sorted through all of the leftover fabric from my new book.  Wow!  What a big pile of bits and pieces and odds and ends.  I sorted them out by project and happily found several piles that could become a quilt of some kind. 

As an aside here, my dear friend Melanie, challenges herself to use the leftovers from one project to create another project.  A Two-for-one, if you will.  Sew, thanks to Melanie's process, I'm inspired to do the same.

I started with a stack of almost 5'' squares leftover from one of the quilts in my new book.  I added more squares from my stash and a white solid.  And came up with a really cute little throw quilt.  Sweet and fun.

I've also been playing around with a stack of blue and cream batiks from a recent magazine project.  In keeping with Melanie's philosophy, I used the left overs to make a cool skinny table runner.  And I STILL have more of this collection leftover.  Hmm.  We'll see what else I can create.

Next I found three UFO's and WIP's that needed layered with batting and backing and machine quilted, including a split ninepatch throw I made a couple years ago, I think.

Here's what I accomplished in the last week or two:

Five quilts -- REALLY, FIVE QUILTS.  Yes, I know that they're on the small side, but that's FIVE quilts out of my to-do pile in my studio.  HURRAY!

And as a happy thought, several of these projects were original designs.  I'm thinking of submitting them to Cut Loose Press.  Yay!  I'll let you know how that goes.....

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Okay, SNOW. 

Can I even say that word legally in the middle of May?

I live in northwestern Pennsylvania, okay, NOT the mountains in Colorado.  But yesterday, nature was laughing at us.  The trees are opening their leaves, flowers are blooms, people are beginning to plant their gardens and their fields.  You know, a pretty normal spring in NW PA.

Then yesterday happened.  May 15th.  The day of SNOW.  Sew weird.  Sew strange.  Seamingly impossible, but it happened.  Yesterday.  Here's the proof:

Happy April Fool's Day....on May 15th.  Hah!  Hah!  Mother Nature.