craftgrrl | Weekend crafting... when I was supposed to be cleaning, of course!

I got this fabric in a bag at a garage sale, and it's obvious that someone had cut them up for some purpose - all of the rectangles were about 10" x 9". Now, I do admit that I question the person who thought the green went with those other two - I know the one floral has green in it, but it's a completely different green. I don't think the picture does justice to just how much they don't go together. I don't know what I'm going to do with the green, probably dump it in a 'to donate' pile, because I have more than enough fabric laying around. Anyway, I do think the other two go well together, so I decided to square up the fabric and add some others and make an interesting quilt I saw in a book. This is not the story of that quilt, unfortunately.

You see, in order to make sure I had enough fabric to make all the squares perfect, I cut all the rectangles down to 8 1/2" square. That left an uncomfortable waste edge of 1" - 1 1/2". And, like you may have gathered from me just not pitching the green fabric, I can't handle waste.

This is what I had to work with:

Enter a quilt pattern tutorial I'd seen on the web awhile back and had the wherewithal to bookmark. Diamond Strings Quilt. From that waste, and a little leftover beige, five quilt squares were born:

Still don't know what I'm going to do with them, but... I feel accomplished. A few notes: I did not use the paper she does in the tutorial. I also do not own a Wondercut ruler, so I just winged it with my Omnigrid ruler. This may be why my squares aren't as perfect as hers, but, well, I'm going to say it adds to the character!

My other project this weekend was this file box. It's perfectly lovely if that's your style, but it doesn't go in my house at all. 'Industrial', 'minimal', or 'zen' are never words you'd use to describe my house. I go for the 'cluttered and comfy' style of decorating - it was the only was I could work in all the dog hair to an overall design scheme. Anyway, a hunk of fabric, a few hours, and a billion little tiny stitches later, I have: