A Funny Thing Happened...

...on the way to a distraction. I got distracted.

The other day I was reading blogs and perusing Pinterest to get my quilting engines revved up, when I spotted this quilt on Pinterest:

Obviously, I HAD to pin it. I stared at it for a little while, trying to piece out the easiest way to make a similar one. But that took too much brain power so I moved on to some blogs. All the while I'm wasting time savoring a peppermint mocha and reading, I know I should get busy on the list of quilts that I just publicly committed to finish! That's when I clicked on Pat Sloan's blog and read this post:  http://blog.patsloan.com/2015/01/pat-sloan-hip-to-be-square-challenge.html

Seriously, I've been wanted to make a postage stamp quilt in the worst way! I haven't ever started one because I was afraid I would be overwhelmed by all those little blocks. But the way she's got it coming together looks so doable! So off I scurried to find a background fabric and the perfect scraps. (At this point, that recently published list of finishes was the furthest thing from my mind.) I found this great cream fabric with tiny brown dots (dots - just like Pat Sloan encouraged us to use!). The fabric looked "fall-ish" to me, so I decided to look for brown, green, orange and gold scraps for a warm, fall quilt. I  whipped this block out in record time:

I was flying high! This is going to be a fabulous quilt. So I take off to find green scraps and while digging around, I pulled a big handful of these out of the bottom of a bin:

These are the arm cut-out pieces from some of the 400 little kids aprons I blogged about here. I was pulling them out of the bin, thinking this will be great - I can get a 2-1/2" square out of each. Otherwise, I can't imagine what I could ever do with all these half-curved squares. Suddenly I stopped dead in my tracks and remembered the quilt I had pinned earlier. For that quilt, I would need a bunch of circles cut into quarters and randomly sewn back together for a scrappy look. OR......I could use these already-cut quarter circles.

I dropped that postage stamp block like someone had blown their nose on it and started sewing quarter circles together. So far, I've got almost enough blocks to make a child's sized quilt. Of course, I had to finish a few blocks and sew them together to see how it's going to look:

Right now, it looks a little more messy than scrappy. But I'm counting on the magic of "scrappy" to pull it all together in the end. I can't wait to see it finished. And then I'm going to get right back on that postage stamp quilt...or my list of finishes.

I hope. ;)