Finally! I have a use for my phone app, purchased so long ago and hardly used.  Anyone else like that?

Yep, it’s Wednesday so that means I’m thinking about my works in progress.

Well, today, it was Schnibbles.  I really had fun making last month’s quilt and although I’m fairly certain I won’t be able to keep this up, winning a prize for my Schnibbles certainly helped my motivation.  It hasn’t come yet, so I can’t tell you what it is, but Mr. Random Generator Number HATES me, so I was pretty surprised when Sherri emailed me with the news.  But as I lay in bed the other night, listening to the night sounds and thinking about if I should do this month’s pattern, all of a sudden I knew exactly what I wanted to do.  It involves old sheets.  But not vintage floral sheets.

Long before Martha Stewart ruled the linen universe and long before everyone’s beds looked the same, you could go down to the department store and there’d be all kinds of sheets in all kinds of patterns, mostly percale, but a variety of eye candy for the bed.  One day in Wisconsin, in their department store, a set of Porthault knock-off linens were in the marked down bin.

Porthault?  I was stunned, and snapped them all up: pillowcases, top sheet, bottom sheet and an extra sheet.  The cool part was that the top sheet and pillowcases had a gentle scalloped edge that was taped with blue linen tape.  Verrry classy.  Well, I wore out the bedding, but still had that extra sheet.  Some years ago, I cut it into large squares to use as table decorations for something-or-other, and I knew I still had those lovely lily of the valley pieces of sheets.  Somewhere.  I rummaged through the boxes in the garage last night and found them (you don’t have fabric in the garage?  Really?), and went to work today making my Schnibbles.  I have a set of papers coming in on Tuesday when I enter the Grading Galaxy, hoping to return just before my sister and her husband arrive for a week.  Now you know why I thought I ought to get busy and get this done.

Here’s the second iteration.  The fabric has two-toned blue lilies of the valley and yellow mini-tulips with green stems and little red dots here and there.  So I added some red thread and some green thread to two of my spools, along with some yellow spools just for interest.

Here’s a close-up of the fabric.  I have my row tag on there, ready to sew up the blocks into the top.  I have enjoyed digging into the stash for this quilt, pulling blues from all sorts of different kinds of fabrics. I do like sewing with one line of fabric, I guess, but I always seem to sneak an extra bit from what I have so as to break up the quilt.  (I guess that means I don’t really like sewing from just one line of fabric.)

I cut strips of my Porthault knock-off sheets into strips for the first border, and angled the ends to help disguise the seams–I have a lot of seams because I’m cutting from those squares from long ago.

First inner border with cornerstones is on in one of those dreaded nighttime photoshots.  I stopped here for the night, and will figure out the outer border in the morning.  I was able to slide in three blue blocks made with fabric from my very first pieced quilt (#3 on my 100 quilts list, never blogged about).  I like using this fabric in quilts here and there.  I like tying both ends of my quilting life together like this.

Linking up with Lee at Freshly Pieced.  For sure, I will be at the end-of-the Linky list tonight!

And here’s the only picture I could find of the sheets on the web.  Sorry it’s so teensy!

I just went and looked up Porthault *online* and a sheet set is going for about two grand.  Yep.
Of course, it is the real thing, and not the knock-off.  Makes quilt fabric look like a bargain.