Late Night Motivation

Lately, it seems that I don't even get up to my sewing room until after 9:00. With two small kids who wake up early (ok, not early by some kid standards, but they still often wake me from a dead sleep) and a job, that doesn't leave me much time in the evenings for quilting. Lately, I have made myself work on something, even if small and just lived on caffeine the following day.

Tonight, it was 10:30 before I got started, but I made some good progress....got the binding cut, sewn together, and pressed for my red, white, and blue quilt. This is the largest quilt I have "made" to date. I put made in quotes because I actually won all of the blocks, so I really just assembled it! Here's what 336" of binding that is ready to be sewn on looks like.

The next thing that I did surprised me even as I was doing it because I have thought about doing this for months, but have never actually made any concrete actions in that direction. As I was putting away fat quarters from making the cats earlier this week, I spied my Joann fabric scraps. I found a piece that could easily make a shelter pillow and I actually made it! It only took a few minutes, but I hope it will be well used and loved. I got this idea from the Stashbusters yahoo group, which I was a member of briefly last year. The suggestion was to keep all your non-usable scraps in a bag by your machine, and when you have enough, make a pillow out of them them. Then, donate this pillow to a local animal shelter where it can be easily washed and used over and over. Here's what mine looks like - the two bags full of scraps and the pillow with them inside. My mom is going to bring another bag tomorrow and then I will close it up and take it over to the shelter, with hopes that they can use it!

Here are the two bags of scraps - batting, selvages, etc.

And the almost finished shelter pillow!

All this in just an hour...it is motivating to see what you can get done even with just a little snippet of time...now off to read myself to sleep!