A couple of other posts that resonate with me

Beth Ferrier about being brave

karendianne about creativity

Nancy  about scrap piecing

As much as I want to make totally scrappy, random quilts, I just can't.  I spent 15 minutes this morning unpicking a white shirting scrap in one of my projects;  in my eyes it destroyed the whole look that I was aiming for. A  2" x 2.5" piece dragged me to a standstill, because I hated how it interrupted the design.  This morning I whipped the piece off the design wall, replaced the offending bit, and now I'm ready to build it bigger.  All the time I could hear a voice telling me to leave it be, overlook it, go with the bigger picture.  One day I may be able to do that, but not this day.  Today I'm just happy that scrap is gone.

This is my design wall this morning ( or part of it, there's more to the left, but I'll show that later).

Some of the cross blocks from the 3.5" scrap pile.  I like these a lot, but....

I had way too many little pieces, when each block only used four of them.  So I am going to make some of these blocks;

12 scraps per block, much more respectable way to whittle down the pile.  And it will also help use up the drawer full of 1.5" squares, that will no longer shut because it's crammed so full.

This is a UFO that I still love, and still want to finish, but I'm just sad that I used such weird red fabric for the centre cross.  It's not something I'd ever buy meterage of, so it must have been a FQ in a bundle or something.  And in my Use-it-up phase I just slapped it next to those nice repros and called it done.  Don't like it at all, but I need to overlook it for now.  I'm going to make a shedload of these blocks and then see if the horrid red still stands out.  Bet it doesn't, but we'll see.

This embroidered piece is something I made in 1982, as a gift for Mereth.  I thought she could make a cushion cover or something from it, but somehow it came back into my possession.  You can't really see from the photo, but it has some brown foxing marks on the calico, and I don't know whether to soak it and see if they come out, or tea-dye it to disguise them.  I'll ponder that this weekend.  I took the design from a McCall's book, and though I really enjoyed doing it, I've never repeated the exercise.  I'll finish this, probably as a framed piece, and then see if it inspires me to do some more stitcheries.

These are some of the scrappy bits of 2.5" strips that I saved all last year.  I have a couple of projects planned with them, but I quite like the look of them separated with horizontal spacer strips.  It's sort of like those DNA tests, with all the little vertical lines.  Simple and effective.

I've spent three hours in the garden this morning, time to get into the sewing room and make some progress.  I hope to have lots more blocks finished before bedtime tonight.