I spent days four and five (today) out of my Crafty 365 cutting apron pieces. So unglamorous! But really, I have to have five together by Saturday, and if I don’t do them assembly-line style, they’ll take over my life!

Since another pile of fabric next to my rotary cutter is the last thing you want to look at, here’s the apron I’m submitting for Tie One On! The theme was polka dots, which was easy for me, because I’ve been going through a big dot phase for about two years now. There are dots on BOTH these fabrics:

I know, I know. I have gone dot crazy! I actually like this for Valentine’s Day: no enormous, obnoxious hearts, just plenty of sweet stuff and a touch of pink. Yay!

It’s come to my attention that I cannot de-clutter my home for more than ten minutes without running into some unfinished project or other. C’est la vie. I welcome the call to productivity.

Today, for example, I found a big stack of blocks - 25 in all - that I put together in ‘05 or ‘06. (Why can’t I remember these things? And why didn’t I blog them at the time?) I wanted to make a string quilt, but not a super stringy string quilt, if that makes sense. And so I pieced the strings in small blocks, stopping and trimming to 8 1/2 inches, 8 1/2 being, for me, the ultimate creative number.

(The width is something I can’t remember off the top of my head, ad I suppose I could measure it, but it hardly seems to matter. I chose it because it made good use of my scraps, and I have a special love for big portrait rectangle blocks.)

I found the blocks, little orphaned things that they were, and was instantly glad to have joined the Crafting 365 pool on flickr. (Am I turning into a Joining Things Psycho?) Normally, I would have tossed them back, or found some other place where they could lie around, forgotten. But when I realized I’d done no crafting today, I thought, okay, it’s time to put these to some use.

I’ve always had the notion of bordering them all in some nice bold fabric, maybe a deep red, and then adding big wide borders in a variety of prints to make a nice big nap blanket, but I could never seem to find the right deep red fabric. But today, because I was in full-blown Craft-Every-Day, Use-What-You-Have, I’m-Addicted-to-Joining-Stuff mode, I decided to march over to my fabric rack, grab some random fabric I had not yet found a use for, and use it as a border, aesthetics be damned.

And wouldn’t you know, I found a half-yard of this nice, deep, red, that I don’t remember buying, or why I would have wanted it in the first place.

And so I’ve been bordering. Go, me!

I know I haven’t blogged in a while, and I hope I’m not in danger of falling off the blog wagon. The fact is, a big portion of my time this week has been taken up by a friend who’s opening a brick and mortar store in my town.

I don’t want to speak too soon, but the whole process has gone so smoothly, so quickly, that it hasn’t made sense to do anything but forge on ahead! So I’ve been, well, forging.

But a little bad weather this afternoon (can’t paint a shop in a big floody rainstorm!) left me with some extra time. I should have used the time to tie up some crafty loose ends, but I did lots of poking around flickr, and accidentally got inspired into starting a new project. Oops!

Am I too late to be taking part in the Scrappy Cabin Challenge? I guess, given that it’s January, I can’t be. And, after all, who’s going to stop me? It’s a free country. I can use what I have to make a log cabin block from my scraps each month.

See?

I “cheated” a bit by using a charm square I got from Repro Depot in the middle, and it actually made the block fun and challenging. And it’s 12″, meaning the block will finish at 11.5, but, whatever. It just looked better at 12!

My plan is to make one of these a month, which has never worked for me before. Still, maybe now that I’m starting in January, I’ll do a better job of sticking to my goal.

Especially since I don’t have all that many scraps. One per month is really the only way!

Who here remembers the Seedpod quilt block swap?

I finally finished my quilt. On a Monday morning, no less! I’d been quilting a block or two ever day for a couple of weeks, until - and I can’t believe this surprised me - there were none left!

The patchwork binding is left over from the pieced back of the quilt, and the fuzzy blur is none other than Ms. Hatbox. She makes a beeline for any quilt or top I lay down, anywhere, and rolls frantically around, so as to spread as much hair and dander as possible.

She calmed down considerably when I told her she could stay.

I may be a moment.

I really, really need to force myself to make the following this year:

- A version of this quilt. It looks so easy, but so pretty and interesting!
- Another alphabet sampler. Not sure what kind, but I can see these making great wedding or baby gifts!
- The Verity Hope dress. I treated myself to one of the gorgeous kits by Malphi, and I’ve been taking it super slow so as not to burn out.
- This dress:

- A skirt from the Cute Skirts pattern.
- A t-shirt quilt! This one is a commission, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get moving on it. But I may want to follow up by making one out of my own old shirts.
- Something out of an old felted sweater. I don’t even know what! But I think Betz White’s new book should provide me with some inspiration!

It’s not a long list, because so many things happen over the course of a year to steer us in all different sorts of creative directions. I’ve listed these because they are either things I need (like some new outfits for spring) and/or thing that will get some supplies the heck OUT of my studio so I can have a more efficient workspace!

I know you’d probably rather stick a fork in your eye than read ANOTHER post about a crafter’s efforts to de-clutter. I know I would, and it’s what? January 3?

Still, I’ve been trying to get my workroom in order since last year, and it’s a long slog, because most of the “clutter” is stuff I should really just make into something. Seriously, to heck with “Use what you have” month! I need to have “Use what you have” year!

I’m starting with pillows, because they are maybe the bulkiest example of things that are too good to throw away, but are also a really stupid use of valuable storage space.

I realized I almost certainly would have to have a pillow in the correct size to show off the first bit of hand-quilting I ever did. I got this little wholecloth kit when I signed up for a hand-quilting class back in high school, and, after the few hours it took me to actually get the stitch down, I worked on it on and off for a couple of years. Because I couldn’t bear to throw anything away then, and little has changed.

Glad as I am to have kept it, it really got on my nerves when it was time to put it away today. So I didn’t put it away at all. Ta-da:

Now that that’s done, I’ve added two more projects to my pillow to-do list:

1. Turning this bird patch into a pillow cover. The patch was a gift from Deborah of ChicCosas, so I want to give it an extra-cute home, no matter how monumental the task of sorting through my fabric scraps is going to be.

2. The “Birthday Pillow.” I have no idea what made me decide I needed to group a bunch of Sublime Stitching designs together in a cute little birthday vignette, but I can’t remove the design from the muslin, so a redwork birthday pillow I shall stitch. This will probably end up as a gift (provided I meet someone as pink as I in time for her birthday) or will take the place of the birdie pillow cover on special occasions.

Wait - do special occasion pillow covers defeat the purpose of de-cluttering? Do I even care?