I'm a bit sick of being bossed around by my patchwork.  I should be like Judy and plan everything out before I start cutting fabric. But that's not the way I work, so I will have to accept that I'm the sort of quilter who wings it at every stage.  I just wish the tops would be a bit more vocal about what they want, before I've made a zillion units that are just wrong for the quilt.

I made this top last year in January, determined to use up every scrap.  As if that were ever going to happen.  It seemed unfinished, I knew it needed a border, and needed to be longer and a little wider, but I was sick of it and left it sitting on the clothes rack for a whole year.
Then all the HSTs seemed to be the answer, and I made the mistake of thinking pinwheels was what the quilt said.   Apparently not, they were violently rejected as soon as I put them on the design wall.  But I made about 50!  And I was also mistaken in thinking I was just going to slap it all together no matter how it looked.  Muttering curses I went back to tthe sewing machine and my eye fell on some little blocks I'd put together and set aside; just 4 HSTs all in the same orientation.  Hmmm, I already had quite a few....

Well, they were just what the quilt was looking for, so then it was only a matter of making enough for the top and bottom borders, and attaching them.

  And we were all well pleased, except that I now have a stack of pinwheels, and there are still triangles to spare.  Sigh....

The next top to be dealt with it this Plaid one; (there are 6 spare blocks, but the quilt is big enough already, so looks like I'll be making another quilt in this pattern)

 I thought I could bully that into submission and make it accept the pinwheels, but it's not having them either.  It didn't mind some light-coloured pinwheels, but it wasn't fussed about them.  Didn't like the 1' squares either.

 That's when I opened a container and found all the rest of the strips that didn't get used up in the Strip Spiral.  I need an intervention for my over-cutting problem....

The Plaid quilt is delighted with the strips, so that's what I'll be sewing this afternoon.

After that, I need to catalogue this basket of blocks; all through the year, whenever I ran out of leader-enders, I'd pick a pattern and just make random blocks from scraps, anything, just so that I could feed the pieces through the machine.  Which is admirable I suppose, except now I have the beginnings of about 5 quilts in this basket, none of them planned, and some of them downright ugly.  I hope I've learned my lesson, and will use only designated leader-enders this year.