Bonnie Hunter and scraps of a crazy woman

It was such a beautiful day today...fairly cool in the morning and warm and sunny in the afternoon.  Everything seems to be blooming and more color pops out everyday.   I actually have 2 daffodils and more blooms coming out of their little green leaves soon.  They have had the bejebers stomped out of them as Bill has been working on a retaining wall and stomping all over them...but I guess long term, it won't hurt them.

This week, I went to the sewing guild meeting and the guest speaker was Bonnie Hunter whose website is Quiltville.com.  She was entertaining, funny and quite a prolific in her quilting.  She also brought a trunk show and displayed about 20 quilts.  She does mostly "scrappy" quilts and has written several books on making quilts from shirts from the thrift store.  She had beautiful quilts and it was hard to believe that she made many them from old clothes.  She doesn't pay a whole lot of attention in assuring that every little piece matches.  She only worries about whether the fabric is  light, medium or dark and never worries about whether the actual fabrics match.  I have discovered that it seems to be very "freeing" sewing scraps together.  It will make you crazy if you "think" the matching too hard.  It will drive you slap silly and I sure don't need to be any sillier or goofier than I already am currently.

Scrappy is supposed to be just that "scrappy".  I sewed about half a dozen "15 minutes of play" blocks over the last couple of days.  I will do a picture soon.  I also looked at my scraps and decided I would put some of Bonnie's thoughts into action.  I made about 20 little blocks from some strips that were too small to sew into my spiderweb blocks.  The squares in each block came out to be only 1/2 inch when the block was finished.  Doesn't that make me sound like a crazy person???  Don't know what I am going to do with the squares, but I felt like I just saved money.  Bonnie's philosophy is that a yard of material might cost you $9-10 dollars a yard and the 2" strip that a lot of people pitch to the trash also cost you $9.00 a yard.  It explains my inability to throw away all those strings of fabric...guess I am just too cheap to waste those scraps.  And the sadder part, is that I love those little scraps.  Anyway, I sure have a problem throwing them away.  I am saving the pieces that are less than an inch in a bag also to stuff a bed for Butchie.  So none of my $9.00 a yard goes to waste.  Waste not want not....that does not ring true with fabric.  A quilter always wants more fabric.  I might just do a 4, 8, or 12 patch miniature quilt with those iddy biddy little blocks.  Then I will have an iddy biddy little quilt.  Always wanted something about me to be iddy biddy...guess it will have to be a quilt.  Several people have asked me to make them a quilt...might just do that.  hehehe!

My little sunflowers and clematus that I grew from seed got planted yesterday.  It got cold last night but they were still holding their little heads up this afternoon.  I have planted tomato, cucumber, basil and bell pepper seeds this week.  They usually do not survive, but I find the will of the little seed trying to push it self out of the dirt shows so much determination, that I sometimes wish for some of that determination.  The seeds usually come up, just don't always make it into a full fledge blooming bearing plant.  I still love to plant seeds and wait for life to spring up.  ...And then there is the time I planted those "bat" seeds and none of them came up...but that is another story for another day...Until we meet again....