Today, I did a few more blocks in the morning. One I finally found the right two fabrics to sew together, made a long strip, which made 2 pinwheels and 4 4-patch squares, which will likely wind up part or parts of 3 or 4 quilts in the future. The trouble with doing several quilts at a time is that you spend a lot of time making small parts to be used in larger parts, then a quilt, and another, and another, etc. But you first spend several days sewing the different parts together. From patriotic fabrics, I am saving a 6.5" strip of twosies from all the red with a light and blue strip with a light color to sew the logs into a "Chinese coins" style quilt someday. I already had sewn enough logs to do two rows, which is half of the wheelchair-sized quilt (or child's quilt.) The nice thing about red and blue is they are such pretty quilts when you're done, they can be used for quilts for kids, too, if the need is there.
The darker blue with its pretty light was one that came about, when I ran into the cutest strip I'd cut from fabric that perished under heavy use into so many quilts over the past 6 months. so it may be the last piece, unless I have the good fortune of finding some more of the fabric if I simply set it aside to squeeze and feel once in a while. It's the first square.
The second square is nostalgic, because it not only reminds me of the quilt shop keeper here who picks the prettiest fabrics available - she bought a few bird fabrics after I told her how much I loved birds, so I was thrilled to see it when it showed up a couple of months later, as did other bird prints she picked. The light yellow with little grey hearts and gold branch of leaves is dear to me, because it was one of the first partial collection from the RJR fabric company my quilt fabric store business I bought to sell at my shop 25 years ago when it opened up. I had two pieces that had to be sewn together, because that's all I had left. It will be given away to a hugs child who needs a warm winter quilt when the weather turns chilly and damp. I hope the quilter does a good job, because I'm making tops for the quilt guild's charity bees who do quilts for all kinds of community purposes nearby.
The reason I sew strips together and let the seam show with imperfectly-matched pieces of the same fabric, is because one of my first projects was for a dear woman whose mother had made 4 tops, placed them in her wardrobe box to "quilt later" for her 4 children. Two of the children died before her, and the lady who brought it to me was dying of cancer, though I didn't know it, and tried to get her to quilt them herself, but she kept telling me, no, that she was just too tired from her cancer most days to do detailed crafts like quilting. Her mother, the quilt maker, had sewn pieces of odds and ends together on the Colonial Lady pattern that has been popular since who knows when and inhabits a page or two in pattern books in the twentieth century for sure, and I don't even know who the designer is. I saw one of my relatives sewing embroidery details on a Colonial Lady square when I was growing up. Sometimes it took someone 20 years between other chores and raising children to finish one, and sometimes, they were just doing the detailed embroidery for a neighbor's quilt, who was able to parse squares amongst several friends, so she could finish it in a year for a beloved young woman in the family. I don't remember exactly who was working on that square, but I remember it, and I thought how fun it was to do colorbook stuff using fabric.
Pardon the ramblings of a quilt enthusiast.
Here are the squares I enjoyed the most in the last couple of days since I posted a pic (you can see the faint outline of a seam line on the upper right hand block in light yellow calico, in memory of Dorothy's mother, who made the Colonial Lady quilt I wound up machine quilting on my longarm of yesteryear. From a distance, you couldn't tell some of the ladies' long hoop skirts were pieced together from strips that were probably leftover from somebody's dressmaking task sometime between the turn of the century and 1939):
There was a silver lining to my little cloud, though. I had wonderful customers, some of whom knew someone else whose life-as-they-knew-it was shattered by this nutty syndrome. They bought the book and made their own flag quilt. I was so tickled when we sold 20 copies (self-published). In a small and remote town, that's a best seller. 
