Petthefabric, Iceblossom, WMUTeach - great progress stories. Thanks for sharing! Love that french fry fabric - I still can't believe how well it got absorbed into your Bonnie Hunter quilt this past year. :-)
I've asked our guild's community quilts coordinator for a backing for the quilt I last posted about and I should be getting that this week so it will go back as a finished product at the June meeting all going as planned. It will be good to get that done. I did get another UFO layered/basted and quilted in time to turn it in to the PHD challenge table this week. I have a couple of ideas of where this one might end up but nothing confirmed yet so I will just hang on to it but am still going to report it as another 3-4 yards used up and in a shareable form. In my world, that counts. :-)
I buckled down and did a serious sort of all of my "free table" bits one afternoon and discovered that most of my colour boxes are now refusing to keep their lids on. :-P I've been busy with other stuff as well - as WMU guessed, a lot of work has been happening in the garden - but I've also been doing quite a bit of sewing and trying to do what I can to control the fabric chaos that is all over the place right now. I gathered all of my quilting mojo together a couple of weeks ago and started making a floral chandelier quilt I hope to be able to gift this summer. The top is done but as usual I'm a bit stuck on the next step because I just don't enjoy the layering/basting/quilting part as much as I enjoy piecing. It will happen, I'm sure.
Since then, I've gone back to my boxes of scraps and started working on two approaches to fabric use - I've gathered a couple of piles of fabrics that play well together and am hoping to convert them into small kids' or lap quilts. These may be bagged up into kits since they can take a while to get going and I really don't want the fabric migrating back into the boxes. I also did a serious search through a box of orphan blocks and have started making placemats out of some of them. Our guild supports Meals on Wheels and it will be nice to have some ready to go when the call comes. I've enjoyed this process quite a bit although it's certainly not efficient, time-wise. It probably takes me as long to put a placemat together as it takes most of you to whip up a 3-yard quilt, but I've really been having fun (and being challenged) with trying some things I wouldn't want to experiment with on a larger project. Lots of math trying to make things fit, and lots of digging through the boxes of scraps trying to find little bits that I can use up in a one-off mini-project. Everything from stash and I figure there's between 1/3 and 1/2 a yard in each placemat. It's pretty minimal progress but I still feel good about it.
The stars and the purple 9Ps I cannibalized for the borders were all from the free table, and the other bits were from my stash. I was also able to use up a really pretty lavender floral for the backing; it was just a little on the flimsy side but was perfect for these placemats. The other picture is a sample of my colour boxes (after digging - they're usually a little tidier than that, but not much).