How a perfectly good idea to reduce some excess fabric turns into a project snowball! Or, how I create work for myself with a little inspiration.

It starts with a bag of muslin, leftovers from various projects over the years.  Some dating back to the muslin I made for my sister’s wedding dress in 1993.  Odds and ends of various width and lengths.

I can’t hardly throw anything of what I perceive as true value away…so here we are…

I pulled these out because I finally felt like I knew what I could do with all of this…cut it into those 10 inch foundation squares like the ones we used at the QOV string quilt gathering a few weeks back.

So chop, chop, chop, wedding dress muslin and all.  You actually can see the front there…

Then because I had purchased a slew of red, white and blue fabrics recently.  And, oh yes…let’s not forget all those plaid shirts I picked up for a pittance, I spent a few hours cutting these up into usable blocks and strips, leftovers and strings went into a string bag.

A revelation occurred midway with a 2-1/2″ strip.    I asked myself “isn’t it possible to cut enough triangles and squares to make one of those Prairie Point Star blocks out of this strip?  hmmmm…let’s try.”

Just add a 2″ square and a 4″ square to those EZ triangle rulers I bought for the Carolina Christmas Mystery Quilt and lo and behold I was making all kinds of star blocks just like this:

And with some of the 1-1/2″ strips I cut…because you just never know when you’ll need a postage stamp…figured I’d try out putting a few of these together…

And you know…since all this cutting and putzing around with design I have lots of leftover strings… which guess what?!  Now I have something to put the strings on!  Those 10″ muslin squares.

The process has gone full circle.

And I’ve created in a roundabout way a few more projects for myself!  The starts of a Star Quilt, a Postage Stamp Quilt and now a QOV string quilt….do you see now how THEY get you hooked?!?!