Tag: Organization

The Eye of the Senior Year Storm

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It’s been a couple of weeks since I wrote up a beginning of the week homemaking post! The amount of time that is needed to make ballgowns is surprising, even to me. With that being said, home management fell by the wayside in order to free up time to sew, so I’ll be swinging the scales back towards cleanliness and order for the next couple of weeks, and then it will be time to start prepping for Renaissance’s high school graduation festivities!

Cooking

This week’s meal plan:

  • Monday: Tacos
  • Tuesday: CP Picadillo Tostadas, Lemony Quinoa Salad with Radishes, Avocado & Basil, Veggie Slaw
  • Wednesday: Rhubarb-glazed Pork, Crushed Red Potatoes, Spring Beans, Peas & Zucchini Ribbons, Rice Pilaf
  • Thursday: IP BBQ Shredded Chicken Burgers, Broccoli Slaw, Lemon-roasted potatoes with oregano
  • Friday: Spaghetti, Normandy Vegetables, Caesar Salad, French Bread
  • Saturday: Barbecue
  • Sunday: Thai Spicy Chicken Enchiladas, Peas, Green Bean Salad with Mustard Seeds, Herbs & Baby Chard

Clothing

  • Laundry will be a priority this week, along with folding and putting away everything (It’s pretty bad in here)
  • Wardrobe rotation from cold weather clothes to warm weather clothes
  • Wash Rachel’s choir dress
  • Nathaniel needs new clothes, especially for church

Cleaning

*silent screaming* There’s so much to do that I can’t even pick a place to start. I might just work on whatever the Tody app tells me is the most overdue and work forward from there. Oh! I do want to spend some time cleaning up the prom dress sewing leftovers, just for the sake of closure. Feels like that’d be a nice thing to do.

Caring

  • Get Nathaniel signed up for summer school so he can free up space in his regular school year schedule
  • Driving practice with Emily & Rachel
  • Help the girls start looking for summer jobs
  • Replace batteries in smoke detectors
  • Make checkup appointments for everyone
  • Create FHE schedule
  • The girls need haircuts
  • Decide if Nathaniel is going to YM camp

Creativity

I will be taking a break for at least a week, if not two. The craft room definitely needs a good cleaning and decluttering, but that might have to wait until after graduation festivities.

Gardening

  • Direct sow 4th Week of April seeds:
    • Cosmos
    • Sunflower: Autumn Beauty
    • Impatiens
    • Zinnia
    • Cucumber
    • Summer Squash
    • Viola
  • Direct sow 1st Week of May seeds:
    • Alyssum
    • Marigolds
    • Sunflower: Jua Maya
    • Cabbage
    • Green Beans (Bush)
    • Lettuce
  • Direct sow 2nd Week of May seeds:
    • Zucchini
    • Sunflower: Sunshine
    • Melons
    • Carrots
  • Plant petunias
  • Assemble hanging baskets
  • Research lawn feeding and weed killing and make a plan
  • WEEDING
  • Ramp up slug killing endeavors because the little demons are eating everything

Celebrating

  • Breathe a sigh of relief that prom season is over, clean up the mess, and engage in some well-deserved recovery activities
  • Clean up the errant Christmas items that I’ve noticed but told myself to ignore while working on the prom dresses
  • Do a wrapping paper/gift bag bin purge
  • Renaissance’s Graduation Party:
    • Address & mail out invitations
    • Check that everyone has appropriate clothing
    • Decide decorations
    • Decide menu
    • Decide activities
    • Decide party favors
    • Purchase serving items

Community

  • Church:
    • Check in with this week’s upcoming special musical number
    • Check sacrament meeting topics for June and pick hymns
    • Enter hymns into Gospel Library app
    • Set up/confirm special musical numbers for June
    • Check in with newly-assigned ministering companions
    • Reach out to newly-assigned ministering sisters
    • Taskify ministering reminders
  • Band Parent Committee:
    • Prepare agenda for meeting, print
    • Print mailing list signup flyers
    • Parade logistics

Top priorities this week:

  • Summer School Registration
  • Garden
  • Laundry
  • Cleaning
  • Graduation party planning

Hopefully I’ll get the blog posts written for each of the prom dresses, too. The weather is going to be really great this week, so I’m looking forward to spending time outdoors after so many weeks toiling away in the craft room. Happy homemaking to you all!

The Beginning of the Craziness that is MARCH

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It’s just one month, it’s just one month, it’s just one month…

OK, it is MARCH. Michael’s birthday is coming up, the sun is finally coming out and garden and lawn stuff is starting to happen, AND it’s Music in Our Schools Month, which means so many choir and band events. *whispers* So. Many. Concerts. This week has three huge events: An all-day all-district choir thing, finishing off with a concert that evening; an all-day band festival that won’t have us getting back to campus until 7pm or so, and a big jazz band thing that both Nathaniel’s and Renaissance’s jazz bands will be performing at that will probably not have us getting home until 10pm or so. That’s just one week. There’s so many more weeks like this.

My tendency is to get a little a lot wound up about logistics and time away from home and all that stuff, but at the beginning of this school year I had an epiphany that I could choose to worry about the stuff coming up or I could decide that I was just going to enjoy it. It’s a subtle shift, but it makes a big difference. When I find myself dreading some upcoming event, I try to remember that I’m smack dab in the middle of the years that I was really looking forward to as a parent—I looked forward to the music getting better when they were in high school, and how much easier it would be to be out in public with them because I wouldn’t have to worry about them running into traffic—and I force myself to just simmer down and enjoy this chapter. No extra worrying needed. This is the good stuff.

As far as plans go for the week…

Cooking

This Week’s Meal Plan:

  • Saturday: Meatloaf
  • Sunday: Chicken Drumsticks
  • Monday: Leftovers
  • Tuesday: Crock Pot: Pineapple Bacon Sausage Soup
  • Wednesday: Quesadillas
  • Thursday: Crock Pot: Spaghetti
  • Friday: Michael’s Choice

As always, it’d be good to bake some bread and/or desserts to throw in there, but with how busy this week is, I don’t think it will happen YET AGAIN.

Clothing

  • Laundry catch-up after last week’s full stop.
  • I need to start thinking about spring wardrobe rotations.
  • Need to start thinking about Easter outfits.
  • Start planning for Rachel’s choir trip to California in April.
  • I so badly want to sew up a closet full of 1950s spring formal dresses. There’s no reason for this, other than I want to be making pretty things.

Cleaning

  • Trying to reset the house after the full stop/basic cleanliness because it’s a busy week

Caring

  • There’s a handful of doctor appointments that need to be scheduled for various family members. It’s quite the production to make appointments with our local medical facilities, so time needs to be set aside for that sort of thing.
  • I had a nice visit with a friend last week when she drove me to the ER. (That’s a weird sentence to write.) We debriefed when I was feeling better and decided we should hang out more. So I’m going to follow up on that this week.

Creativity

  • I need to figure out my new portable project now that I’ve finished the Baking Doodle Cowl test knit. (Post coming soon!)
  • I don’t think I’ll get time to work on creative projects beyond “In the Van Crafting” this week
  • I’m thinking about abandoning the Chatsworth BOM quilt. I am just really not enjoying how the pattern designer writes his instructions and I don’t want to extend the mental effort to manipulate his instructions into techniques that work better for me.
  • I need to decide if I’m going to do a special musical performance near Easter. I kind of set a goal at the beginning of the year that I’d try to do a musical number every six weeks, and I did one in January, so the next one’s deadline is coming up. I have not been good at practicing music at all lately, so I need to tighten that up ASAP.

Gardening

  • This will be a Year of Resurrection for the garden. It’s been largely ignored for the past two years while I worked on my master’s degree. I have a grand vision of an English Cottage/Potager Garden that takes up my entire backyard someday, but this year we’ll just work with what we’ve got back there and really talk about and start fleshing out extension plans on paper.
  • I’m still working on taskifying all the various reminders and due dates of stuff for the garden, so I need to be ok with having to purchase some of my plants this year because I’ll remember that I like them and then realize I should have started them six weeks ago—like petunias. Whoops.
  • I need to inventory my trellises and poles and order more if they’re needed. It’s my hope to get them set up this coming weekend.
  • I need to do a second round of pea planting.
  • I need to check and see what seeds I need for April planting and order more if needed. (This is a great list idea that I came up with and very handy!)
  • Keep an eye on the rhubarb and start working it into our meals as soon as it start producing stalks.
  • Start more delphinium because there’s only two growing right now.
  • Use more of the countertop herb garden because it only takes two days for it to become a countertop JUNGLE.

Celebrating

  • Michael’s birthday is next week, so preparations for that
  • Easter is at the end of the month, so I’ll need to find out if I’m hosting anything and prep for that.

Community

  • Our community has a scholarship they give out and the application is due on March 17th, so I need to nag Renaissance about that.
  • Setup signup questions or something like that for the Band Booster Facebook group because I’m tired of dealing with the spam
  • Setup an embarrassingly overdue thank you note writing session for Evening of Jazz
  • Make significant progress on the Trivia Night fundraiser so I don’t look like a lazy loaf at next week’s meeting
  • Same re: Popcorn fundraiser
  • Because we have our monthly meeting next week, I need to do a lot of prep work over the weekend for that—agenda, send out reminders, etc.

It’s good to sit down and figure out priorities for the upcoming week. When I first sat down to write this post, I was overwhelmed by what I saw on the calendar, but once I sit and think about what really needs to be done, it feels much more manageable. Bonus: It also helps me realize how important it is right now to SAY NO to requests. Remember, this is an enjoyable time in parenting, so ENJOY IT. All the beautiful, all the fun, all the exciting stuff—All of that only happens if you’re willing to put in the behind-the-scenes work. I thought about this really hard last spring and came up with a great motto that I use when the work starts feeling like a little too much: I welcome the work that makes my life beautiful.

Because, darn it, I want a gloriously beautiful life for me and my family. So I’ll show up and I’ll do the work.

Have a great week!

An Organized House: Thoughts on the House & Holiday Plan

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Years upon years ago, I discovered the Houseworks Holiday Plan, which would later be renamed the House & Holiday Plan. It was originally published on the OrganizedChristmas website, which has since shut down. Since I’d printed out all of the schedules, checklists, and printables in 2011, I was still okay to continue with my tradition of following the plan each autumn, which I’ve attempted to do every year.

I’ve never completed the entire plan. I think I’ve been attempting to complete it since 2005 or 2006, and I’ve never made it all the way through because there was no way to complete those room-specific decluttering and cleaning tasks in the one week allotments when you’ve got four children and you’re dealing with back-to-school activities. I was thinking on this predicament during one of my planning periods during the last week of teaching school this year and realized I could just start the plan earlier and schedule extra time for decluttering the kids’ bedrooms. Don’t you just hate it when you have such a simple idea that really should have occurred to you, like, a DECADE ago?!?! Ugh.

The house is destroyed, which was the expectation after spending a year studying and student teaching, so at least things aren’t worse than originally planned. Regardless, there’s a lot of work to do to get things back in shape around here. I hit the “go” button on the House & Holiday Plan this last week and will use the extra time to get things reorganized over the summer. I’ve allocated two weeks to each kid bedroom, my bedroom, and the craft room for a total of ten weeks of decluttering, deep cleaning, organizing and, hopefully, a little redecorating and prettying up.

I started with Nathaniel’s and Emily’s shared bedroom this week because: 1) It’s got the most stuff in it, and 2) We never did a thorough clean out/declutter when Emily went off to college in the fall because she decided at the last minute to live on-campus and I actually packed up her stuff while she was at class before dropping it off that evening. Yeah, I packed up my kid in less than twenty-four hours. (Last summer was super stressful!!) I was too busy to deal with the leftovers and it’s been waiting for me for almost an entire year to get back to it. Well baby, I’M BACK FOR IT.

I like to completely gut a room when I’m doing a deep clean–take out every last thing, physically touch everything à la Marie Kondo and decide if it’s going to be kept, donated, or thrown away. This means that my living room is currently holding every physical possession of Nathaniel’s and Emily’s. So, another mess in order to deal with the original mess. *mirthless chuckle*

But, man, does it feel good to empty out an engorged room, rearrange the furniture, deep clean that sucker, and then judiciously bring things back in. *satisfied sigh*

So that’s what I’m up to right now, and I plan to come back next Friday/weekend and show you some pictures of something organized. I do much better when I have deadlines, so there it is–let’s get a bedroom put back together and prettified.

3 Ideas for More Organized Quilting in the New Year

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I have a nifty little project rotation schedule in my mind that I try to use to work through old projects and not let the scrap bins get out of hand, and it’s just not working. I sat down to figure out what was going wrong, and just decided that I needed to make it work alongside what I want to do, instead of it being the main operating system of my craft room. As I’m sure you’re aware, every new year and month brings up new potential projects that you need to decide if you’re going to pursue or not. New babies, weddings, graduations, a crazy pattern that comes out that NEEDS to be made ASAP because it’s amazing, a new dress because of fifty thousand reasons…there’s just a lot that you can’t plan for, and it wreaks havoc on a system designed to corral the creative madness.

So…Idea #1: Each month will have its “must makes” that I will work on until they’re done, and then the remainder of the month will revert back to my UFO/Project Rotation schedule and I’ll make headway on the projects collecting cobwebs until the month ends. It’s simple, far too simple, but until I wrote it out I couldn’t see it as my solution.

I came up with this idea in October and finetuned and planned it out, but it felt like something was missing, and I finally realized what it was whilst lounging in my bed during the Great December Sickness of 2021–I’m not making enough scrap quilts. At all. The scrap bins no longer close, and I don’t have time for scrap quilts even though I won’t be able to use my craft room by the end of the year if they keep multiplying like they have been, completely unchecked. And then I randomly remembered that I came up with a weird little system for THIS EXACT PROBLEM back in 2019: Scrappy Thursdays.

Scrappy Thursdays were devoted to working on scrap projects and block of the months. It didn’t matter what I was working on outside of Scrappy Thursdays, I’d set it aside and work mostly from the scrap bins for that one day every week. I have four separate storage bins that held the fabric and patterns for four separate projects, and each week had its Project #1, #2, #3, or #4. It was still in experiment form when it dissolved out of my life, but it was a rather successful experiment while it was in progress! I just got really busy with the Blank Quilting ambassador thing and had no extra time for play, which was fine because I was having a lot of fun with all the yummy Blank fabric. Ah, memories…

Idea #2: I’m going to reinstate Scrappy Thursdays in 2021. I’m really looking forward to it. My chaos-loving brain really enjoys the break from my serious “get ‘er done” projects that I work on for the majority of the week, and my “obsessed with productivity” brain loves that I’m making progress on so many different things.

Beautiful Mammoth Flannels being cut for one of next year’s Christmas quilts!

I had another good idea during the Great December Sickness of 2021, which is my Idea #3: Use my leaders and enders for greater Christmas productivity. As in, cut the fabric for the Christmas quilts I want to make for Christmas next year NOW, and use them as my leaders and enders throughout the next year. When it comes time to work on said Christmas quilts at a later date, I’ll already have a ton of the piecing done. I’ve even set up an annual reminder that the week after Christmas is for cutting next year’s leaders and enders!

I’ve got the fabric for two of next year’s Christmas quilts prewashed and in the process of being cut. I have at least one more, if not two more, Christmas quilts I want to make this upcoming year, but no idea what pattern and/or fabric I’m going to use just yet, so obviously can’t precut anything for those quilts.

I’m excited for this extra bit of organization to help things run smoothly in the craft room! Do you have any good tips or tricks for quilty organization? I’d love to hear them! Happy New Year!

Free Gift: Sewing Room Cleaning Checklist

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Hi friends! As a token of my appreciation for your camaraderie all these years, I decided to make my sewing room monthly cleaning checklist into a PDF that you can use in your own sewing rooms! I wish you a wonderful holiday season and hope that the new year coming will be filled with beautiful, creative moments!

2021_sewing_room_cleaning_checklist_arrowsDownload

Meal Planning and Sharing Cooking Responsibilities with Teenagers

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I’ve noticed an uptick in views on my two autumn meal planning posts in the past couple of weeks, and I thought I’d take a moment to write about how we’re doing dinner in our home these days with four relatively kitchen-ready kids. Quarantine really had the kids baking and cooking a lot out of sheer boredom, and I’ve had a lot of back and foot pain for the past year, so we’ve morphed into a more “all hands on deck” meal preparation group.

Summer Recipe Master List

As summer was beginning this year, I put in three zucchini plants in the garden because our one zucchini plant in 2020 failed and I didn’t want to run that risk again. I then decided to go through all my cookbooks and find every zucchini recipe I could so that I’d have an arsenal of ideas for dealing with the very likely avalanche of zucchini we’d encounter. Whilst perusing zucchini recipes, I noticed a lot of fantastic vegetable recipes that I’d always wanted to try every summer but had never gotten around to preparing, so I decided to make a giant master list of summery recipes in my bullet journal. I tried to choose as many recipes from this master list over the summer, and the kids got caught up in the novelty of it and started helping me prepare dishes. By the end of the summer, we often had four different people working in the kitchen at once and could get a full, vegetables-included dinner on the table in about forty minutes.

Another recently-added consideration is that I’ve developed a soy allergy, which means I can eat very little processed foods anymore. Soy is in freakin’ EVERYTHING, people, UGH! So we’ve had to start making a lot of stuff from scratch, which means more cooking and time in the kitchen.

I decided to invest in a 24″x36″ whiteboard at the beginning of autumn and drew in gridlines. With school and after school activities returning to something resembling normal, I knew I was going to become very busy very quickly and that we were going to need a dinner command center that the kids could consult if I wasn’t home when it was time to start cooking dinner.

I went through my cookbooks again, this time for autumny recipe goodness, and now I spend a little time each Saturday morning while Michael and I are catching up and planning out the next week to write down each day’s activities in the top boxes on the meal plan board, and then I use my autumn recipe master list to plug in some dishes in black ink. (Or, for busy weeks, we just have easy-to-make foods, obviously.) As the kids wake up, they come along and write a star in their personal color next to the dishes they’re going to make, keeping in mind what they’re going to be up to that particular day in regards to music lessons and the like. (Don’t volunteer to make anything if you’re not even going to be home at dinner!) It’s been a godsend with my foot surgery recovery…very little standing in the kitchen for me anymore.

Last week’s meal plan, with activities blurred out because it’s a bad idea to post your kids’ schedules on that internet.

It’s interesting to read through the many iterations of meal planning that I’ve done over the years. It just goes to show that we’re always adapting to new circumstances and abilities, and if it works for you in that moment, then it’s the right choice. I used to get critical of myself for not doing things the way I saw other adults doing things in their homes, and it’s only been recently that I’ve really figured out that it’s ok to change the way you do things and it’s ok to not take another person’s advice if you have a pretty solid expectation it will not work for you. You do you, and I’ll do me. But share what you’re doing so I can steal the ideas that will help me out, and I’ll keep sharing what I’m doing in case you want to steal some of my ideas, too.

Happy eating!

My “New & Improved” Plan for Battling UFOs and Scraps

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Last year I came up with a plan that would allow me to work through more UFOs, whittle down the overflowing scrap baskets in my craft room, and allow me to work, guilt-free, on some new projects.  In the past, I always start the new year with grandiose plans to blast through all of my UFOs, and the white-knuckle willpower would only last about six weeks because the textile world is constantly releasing new fabric, yarn, and pattern collections.  So, I came up with this project rotation:

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The Original Project Schedule

And it worked really well for about six months until I discovered a glitch with my system–I never chose fabric from my stash when it came around to make a “new” project, choosing instead to use new fabric from a new collection that excited me.  The stash was starting to grow faster than normal, and I had this weird reluctance to cut into any of it because it was dear to me.  You don’t buy fabric or yarn with no plan unless you’re really in love, which makes it hard to use said fabric or yarn.  But, as a wise homeschooling parent told me about art lessons with my kids, “Art supplies is meant to be consumed, not conserved.”  The same is true of fabric and yarn.  USE THEM.

Plus, I’ve been noticing a lot of my contemporaries breaking into the pattern market, and they are killin’ it, which made me start wondering if perhaps I should start at least trying to write my own patterns for my use?  I know how patterns work by this point in my creative “career,” and the challenge involved excited me as well.

And then we did some charity blocks in quilt guild and it just made me feel good to make those.

So my project rotation schedule needed a few tweaks:

wordswag_1514822760965

And it’s been working WONDERFULLY.  I love the challenge of coming up with my own patterns, and I really love the idea of #everytenthproject being a service project–it’s like paying tithing on my creative abilities, for which I am so grateful to possess.

I kept a spreadsheet detailing my projects for last year, and it really helped me with my stash management and with branching out of my comfort zone:

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(It also alerted me to the fact that I tend to only knit with new yarn, which led to the decision to stop stashing yarn completely…because once it goes into the stash, chances are high that I’ll not be interested in using it EVER after that.  Interesting.)

It worked extremely well until I started sewing again for Fat Quarter Shop–by the very nature of those projects, they are always “new” fabric projects, which very quickly started eating up the next available “new” slots in my plan.  I’ll have to watch out for that this year, and possibly come up with a plan to accommodate those projects–the turnaround time on them is tight, so it’s not possible to actually have a “plan” to include those projects into my schedule.  I might leave them out of the “rotation” altogether, actually, and just enjoy the ride when I’m asked to ride along…because, duh.

Oh, another important note: Babies and weddings don’t have to follow the schedule because they are also impossible to plan around.  I just plug them into the spreadsheet where they belong and then work around them as necessary because I LOVE BABIES AND WEDDINGS.  I’m a gift-crafter at my core.

What I find, though, is that this schedule greatly reduces the chances of acquiring more UFOs.  I’m horrendously distracted by the new-and-shiny, but when I’d start thinking about cutting for or casting on a new project, I’d consult my spreadsheet and see if it could fit into the next category up for grabs.  If it didn’t, I’d tentatively schedule it; but more often than not, when I came up to its turn in the rotation, my excitement for the new pattern would have waned and I could move on to something that had been on my bucket list and would truly bring me pleasure.  I started 2017 with thirty-eight UFOs, finished (or donated or frogged) nine UFOs, and am taking in two new UFOs–that means I now have thirty-one UFOs, which is totally an improvement!  I have never ended a year with less UFOs than I had at the beginning of it.  Feels good.

And now it’s onwards to a productive 2018!  Happy New Year, and may you find a little time each day to move forward on your projects.

clementine-qal-e1504126058289And if you’re looking for an idea for a service project, maybe you want to consider joining Fat Quarter Shop’s Clementine Quilt Along?  I’ve committed to it, and it would be lots of fun to have some more friends quilting along, too!

You can find more information about the Quilt Along by clicking here to visit the Fat Quarter Shop Blog.  Proceeds from this quilt along will benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

 

My New Plan for Battling UFOs and Scraps

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I made no resolutions this year because I knew that, by mid-February or so, I’d be looking for justifications to abandon them.  Instead, I decided to stew on the things I would normally make resolutions about, and hope that feasible solutions would present themselves to me.  Lo and behold, whilst scrutinizing my bulging scrap bins and the big ol’ bin o’ UFOs a few days ago, a plan magically unfolded in my mind:

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How freakishly simple is that?!  Lather, rinse, repeat.

I always start out my year with the resolution to finish as many UFOs as possible, but then new patterns, yarns, and fabrics start popping onto my radar, and it’s just such a teeth-clenching battle to not chase after the new bright and shinies.  And that sums up my entire creative year.

Now, instead of white-knuckling it as much as possible, I’ll plan for finishing up a few UFOs each year, a few “new-to-me” projects, and a few scrap bin-based projects.  No guilt required.

AND…if it’s time for me to work on a UFO, and I pull out a UFO and decide to just donate it instead, IT COUNTS.  The goal is to whittle down the UFO pile and close those open loops, and that happens even if I donate a half-finished project to Goodwill.

I am super excited to give the plan a try!

What are your methods for finishing UFOs and managing scraps?

 

Scrapping Happy

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My family and I just moved back stateside after a five month stay in Queensland, Australia.  All the boxes we packed up were stored in my craft room, which means I haven’t been able to get to my sewing machine until today, almost a month after getting back into our home.  With the task of unpacking, I’ve taken the opportunity to re-organize my craft room and make it a little more user-friendly, which included finally finding a permanent eye-pleasing way to store my fabric:

Oh, I like rainbow order.  The two big bins on the bottom of each cart hold a specific color each, with the pieces being larger than fat quarter-sized.  I’ve organized the bins into pink, red, orange/yellow, green, aqua/turquoise, blue, purple, multi-colored, gray/black, and brown/white.  The middle bins hold fat quarters in any combination of the two lower colors (i.e. orange, yellow and green in the second cart), and the upper bins hold scraps–the top holds anything 2.5 inches or thinner, and the second from the top holds anything larger than 2.5 inches and smaller than a fat quarter.  The carts used to hold construction paper for my kids, but I’m taking a sabbatical from homeschooling this year and decided to re-purpose the bins for my own personal use.

One bin won’t close easily:  the “larger than 2.5 inches” aqua/turquoise & blue bin.  This tells me that I need to start working from that bin, and it turns out that a large portion of that bin is a bunch of snowman prints from a epic failure of a project many years ago.

What a great place to start!  I decided to whip something up out of the snowman fabric to give away, partly because I know someone who decorates heavily with snowmen during the winter months, and also because just seeing the fabric reminds of my epic failure, which isn’t a whole lot of happy-making for me.  Take the failure and make it into something that blesses the life of another!

Since Sherri McConnell over at A Quilting Life inspired me to start working with my scraps with her “Scraps Monday” series, I decided to take a quick look through her book, Fresh Family Traditions, and came across her “Sugar Pine” pillow pattern, which I think will work smashingly for this fabric.

I’ve got the first bit of sewing done, and I’ll work on turning these HSTs into some QSTs in the upcoming week.

I did go ahead and turn one of the HSTs into a QST, just because I wanted to see how it would look.  They’re at the top of this next picture:

I think it’s going to turn out rather well.  I’m planning on making two pillows, because I’m a “pillow set” kind of gal, and I’m rather certain that the recipient is as well.  Or maybe I’ll end up liking them and being able to overlook the “epic failure” memories, and just keep them for myself.  We’ll see…

Linking up with:
Scraps Monday @ A Quilting Life
Sew Cute Tuesday @ Blossom Hearts
WIP Wednesday @ Freshly Pieced
Let’s Bee Social @ Sew Fresh Quilts
WIPs on Wednesdays @ Esther’s Blog
Needle & Thread Thursday @ My Quilt Infatuation
Scrap Happy Saturday @ SoScrappy