Starting With a Clean Slate

I recently took down my design wall. It's been up there for years, but one of the cats clawed it and pulled out one of the tacks holding the flannel to the wall, and so it was bagging in one spot. I got up on a chair with a hammer to fix it and it was so dusty and full of threads that I pulled the whole thing down and washed and dried it. When I hung it back up on the wall, it was like starting with a blank page, a clean slate. It was like staring over in my quilting life.

Of course in order to remove the thing I had to take down all the half-started, trials and errors and false starts I had pinned up. They're now neatly piled up and waiting until I'm ready to give them my full attention. In their place, I've put up my bird series as inspiration, and I'm going to make a big quilt for Debra's women's shelter clients. This quilt is meant to compliment some backing fabric she's posted as inspiration. If you want to play along, she probably has enough fabric for more quilts.

I'm starting with some orphan blocks. I made a ton of these blocks awhile ago, and I've used some of them for various smaller projects, but I still have plenty. I do have a lot of fabric cut, so my goal is to make up as many of these blocks as possible and to use them in the quilt.


It's a basic four-patch block made up of 4.5" squares. The corner triangles make it look like a more complex version of a snowball block.


My supplies are ready. Blank slate. New project.