Happy New Year - time to make a quilt!

Technically it's not New Year's yet - still a little less than two hours to go -- would someone please tell the neighbors! They started fire crackers at dusk and haven't let up yet. Poor Pixxie has been in hiding under our bed all evening. It's a terrible thing to do to a cute puppy. (Sigh)

So! Guess what I've been doing today?

First, we spent the entire morning taking down the Christmas stuff. I love Christmas, but when it's over, it's over. I guess because it's a long season -- we put up our tree the day after Thanksgiving - and sometimes I leave it till New Year's, but this year things worked out differently. (Had help so you take it when you can get it! Grin).

That done it was time for some therapy in the studio. I still haven't quite dug out from all the happenin's this past month (customer quilts, Quilts of Hope, Jamie camping out in the studio while here to help with A-1 set ups, mounts of paperwork around the computer, etc.) but I decided that some of the mess just had to be ignored because I couldn't ignore the call to piece!

Besides, I am teaching a class next month at the local quilt shop and Saturday is her sign up day - ya' think I should have a class sample made?

So that's what I've done. I've pulled out scraps and got busy. This is a Square in a Square pattern from the original book (fondly called 'the blue book') called Prairie Claws. The pattern is quite simple to piece and used up a lot of scraps. Each block had the potential of 36 different prints! My kind of scrappy!

Back in the spring a local 'famous person' (lives in north Houston) Lynn Roddy Brown came to speak at our guild. She's the author of "Simple Strategies for Scrap Quilts" published by That Patchwork Place. She not only had a fabulous trunk show, but wonderful suggestions on how to tame your scraps. One thing she does is take fat quarters and cut them into 3 portions of 5.5 x 20+ - she even shared how you could do an exchange with friends. Well, I went through my fat quarters this spring and did just that - I cut them up into strips. It was from this 'pile' that I worked on my quilt today.

I had (75) 5.5 x 20 which were perfect for the Prairie Claws project. I needed 1.5 strips for my 'surround' strips on my Options 1 and 3, and I needed a couple of 3-7/8 squares and a couple of 2 inch squared from each print. And I even have a little left over! Not bad!!

The pattern calls for 28 pieced blocks to make a queen size quilt, but for my class sample I only made 5. This would make a cute quilt if borders were added, but I think I'll hold out and make it bigger -- just not before Saturday! In class the students should be able to do all five blocks, at least one or two -- depends if they are smokin' needles or not (grin). Today I was smokin!!

So here's my New Year's Eve therapy...what do you think?

I don't know, seems kinda sad without my Pixxie to pose with it. Dang those fireworks!

Happy New Year friends! I think I'm going to finish cutting out the background fabric so I can place all the parts and pieces in yet another UFO bag. Ah, but this one has potential!