One woman's trash ...

...is another woman's treasure. If you are a scrapquilter you already live by that mantra. This quilt illustrates the point. My mother and I attended a yard sale over a year ago that was held by a woman who used to work in the LQS. Her ad said there would be patterns, books, fabric, UFOs and even finished tops. There were--in abundance! There were also grab bags of fabric. These were large, clear plastic bags, so you had an idea of what was in them, but there was no full disclosure until you got them home. Mine was all fabric pieces, some of them were even 1/4 yard. Mom's however, had a buried treasure within--at least I thought so. Nestled in among the fabrics were 50 finished, scrappy 4-patch blocks. Mom does not like to finish someone else's discarded project. I seem to thrive on the challenge, so these blocks became mine. One evening, when I wasn't in the mood to work on any of my current projects, I pulled out these blocks and thought it should be pretty easy to come up with a quick way to use them. I started thumbing through my favorite "scrap quilt" books and came across this one called Montana Scrappy that I had marked in Lynn Roddy Brown's Simple Strategies for Block-Swap Quilts. (I love that book!) All I had to do was make 150 more 4-patch blocks and 200 HST. Sure, pretty easy.

Eventually I pulled it all together and was very pleased with the results. I gave this to a friend for her birthday last month.

For some reason I have a need to complete other people's abandoned projects (as I will verify in a future post someday). Why can't I just stick to my own UFOs?

'Til next time, from the little mountain valley where the sagebrush grows,
Janet O.