Sew Busy This Weekend....

We had such a great, but busy-at-home, weekend this weekend.

First off, on Friday I rearranged the room shared by the two youngest boys. We got some great shelves a while back and they do so much to neaten up the toys, but we'd placed them in the only available space -- along the wall that greets you when you walk in the room.

Let me just say, walking into a room and having TALL bunkbeds right in front of you, and then TALL shelves just to your side, it kind of makes the room feel claustrophobic, even though when you enter the room there's loads of space. I decided to fix that.

I moved a small table out of the bedroom and down to the living room. The boys need a place to sit while eating and watching  movies, as The Chemist is not allowing food on the new couches. Sitting on the floor doesn't work so well, not with a greedy golden retriever in the house. So, now the bedroom table and chairs are in the living room, which also freed up that wall in the bedroom, and the shelves are moved over. No more cave feeling when you walk in their room. Hooray! I've no "before" photos, so I won't bother with "after" photos, either. Sorry. 


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I also rearranged a little area in the dining room/office/school room/sewing room, which really opened it up. Easy thing, just took these four cubes and stacked them vertically at the end of one of the bookshelves.

now vertically stacked at the end of the bookshelves...

I put the arm chair, which has been floating around the room and getting in the way, in the spot in front of the window where the cubes used to live. Then I switched contents around, so that my sewing things are on a bookshelf, and the boys' "daily use" school items are in the cubes -- one cube per boy, and one shared cube for "mom needs you to be busy with something" small activities approved for school-time use.

I did have to declutter the bookshelves, moving "done with those" books to my storage shelf, in order to make room for the sewing things. It is a clutter free zone, now, rather than a clutter-catch-all surface next to the computer desk.  Love that.

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Then, I sewed. I sewed and I sewed and I sewed.


And now, all 25 squares for my Diary Quilt are done. 

Except not really, because I have decided I really want this to be a quilt for my bed, and 25 six-inch squares do not a queen size quilt make.

Luckily for me, I've learned a lot doing this project and figured out a way, almost all by myself, to make the quilt larger without needing extra blocks or infinite-seeming borders added. Setting triangles and sashing to the rescue, and I'll have a gorgeous quilt that will look something like this (colors not 100% accurate). Many thanks to Jules/Mrs. So & So for the mock-up for me (complete with sizing/rotary cutting directions).

mock-up of Diary Quilt
the blank center squares are where the Diary Quilt Blocks will be
but - multi-colored triangles around each, or switch to black??

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Because I'm waiting on my bigger cutting mat (which is in the mail, on its way here) and because I'm debating the colors for the setting triangles, I returned to my long-neglected red white & blue quilt. Five squares to go, and then I'll just need to join them into quadrants and then into a quilt top. Scary to think that before too long I'll have my first quilt top done. Even scarier when you remember where I came from, back when I tried to use a scrapbooking paper cutter to cut fabric.

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Which brings me back to -- colors for the setting triangles. My original plan was to do multi-colored, as indicated in the drawing above. Each block center would have a color that coordinates with that block.

Then I started thinking, what if I do black setting triangles and multi-colored sashing instead? To give a more unified look, as well as make the block centers really pop?  The black I would use is actually black printed with a white floral print (as used in the Puss in a Corner block, and the Thrifty block, and the Broken Dishes block....). 

What do you think? Too much black? Or worth it, to unify the quilt?? Black, or multi, what would you choose??  And, what did you do this weekend?