Oversaturated

I belong to a quilt guild and we get together on a Saturday, most months, to make charity quilts.  At our last outing, I picked a wide variety of brightly colored fabric from the donated stash and started cutting it into 8-inch strips.  I didn't have a pattern in mind, I just wanted to make it scrappy pieces 8 inches tall and a variety of widths.  

Now, what I should have done is figured out exactly how large the quilt was going to be, then calculate how many strips to cut.  Did I do that?  No, I did not.  I just kept cutting those 8-inch strips until there was no more fabric to cut.  I was cutting for hours and hours.  How dumb is that?

When I finally got done cutting and went to lay the rectangles out on the design board, I saw I had too many for the vague size I had in mind.  Imagine that!  Also, I no longer thought the fabrics looked as wonderful together as they did when I picked them out - they looked really, really bright.  I thought maybe I was oversaturated and since I was running out of time, I was hopeful that finishing it at home would give me a new viewpoint.

Here you see the top two rows are the scrappy rectangles.  Originally the entire front was going to look like that, and the Barbie fabric at the bottom was going to be the backing.  The scraps still looked oversaturated in color, so I made Barbie bands out of the hot pink to break it up a little.  It didn't tone down the oversaturated color, but it did tone it down visually by adding some one-fabric bands.

Here's the new backing fabric, at the bottom.  I don't have this quilt finished yet - hopefully next week - but at least I have a plan.  This week I finished piecing the top.

But what to do with all those leftover rectangles??????  By this time I was a little (understatement) tired of them!  Part of me wanted to take them back to the guild stash.  But the other part of me said I needed to finish what I started.

I sewed them into strip sets of three bands, so I could crosscut them into smaller pieces.

I love my slotted ruler so much.  This is the easiest way in the world to cut strips - particularly if your fabric isn't folded.  I sometimes got a slight V-shape if I had the fabric folded more than once, so I don't do that anymore.  But for a flat piece like this, you can't beat it.

See how easy that was?

Now I have lots of skinny rectangles, each of them 2 1/2 inches tall, in a variety of lengths..  I'm going to sew them skinny end to skinny end and make narrow bands.  

These two fabrics are going to be incorporated.  I think I'll save this second quilt to work on at our next get-together.  It's going to take lots of sewing, and I was sort of tired of that fabric when I thought I was doing just one quilt.  I'm still feeling oversaturated and in need of getting back to my own projects.  I'll share both of these quilts when they're done.