Sew My Stash 2016

I often forget to clean out my sewing machine and when I do remember I find this fluffy mess. You can scold me for forgetting to respect the power tool (thank you Sam Hunter for keeping me honest) but you can't say I don't use this machine -- All. The. Time. Because being creative is important.

I scraped and picked and dusted and brushed and that lump is what came out of the bobbin workings of this wonderful machine.

I used up the last of a 2500 yard cone of Masterpiece from Superior Threads and started a new cone. If you want 100% cotton piecing thread this is perfect.

As part of Sew My Stash 2016, I dug through my ridiculously large stack of 5" charms to put together a small quilt. I regularly trim my scraps to usable sizes. I create 5" charm squares and 2.5" strips to clean up after a project. Sometimes this means I have one or two charms, sometimes more. I also create 3.5" tumblers and 2.5" charms. I'm still collecting both of these so a quilt out of those will likely be a way down the quilting road.

For this quilt I pulled greens, oranges, yellows, and some low volume and fun kid prints to make this small quilt. I've had a plus quilt made with 5" charms on my list for a while and this exercise allowed me to get that out of my system along with moving some charms from my stack into a quilt. I think I have at least one more scrappy quilt to work out of this collection of scraps before the end of the year.

I found some green flannel for the backing that will be perfect for this quilt.

There have been some posts, discussions, and opinions about derivative works and some rules The Modern Quilt Guild published for quilt submissions for QuiltCon. I haven't waded through the mud and muck of that, but if you want to take a gander at some opinions, Sam Hunter wrote a post that is an excellent read and links to several other sources (to see the original post from MQG you have to be a member but they did post to their blog about it). I haven't made a decision about how I feel about all of this since I consider myself a quilter first. I am a member of the Baltimore Modern Quilt Guild but the decision to join was more out of my reluctance to join a traditional guild than about joining a modern guild. I'm not here to sway you one way or the other. Go read about it and formulate you own opinions.

I think I'm just going to keep being a BadAss Quilter. At least that title always seems to fit.