I finished sewing together all of the "Sparkling Gemstones" blocks last night. It looks like I will have a few left over (it is 12 rows of 9 for the quilt). I never know what to do with leftover blocks - in some cases, I just make the quilt bigger by one row but in this case it would interfere with the design, and I also think it would make the piece I have chosen for the backing be too small.

So I guess I'll save them. Maybe someday I'll have enough similar-colored extra blocks from quilts to put together into a sampler. Or maybe someone will figure out a "home for wayward quilt blocks" where you can send them - and then someone who needs a few blocks in that color and design to fill out a quilt can adopt them.

(Or maybe I'd have enough for a small pillow top; I haven't checked).

I haven't decided yet whether to do the time-consuming "layout" on the floor, where I try to balance color and design, or to do something I've read about but never actually done - just put all the blocks in a sack, shake it up, and pull blocks out and sew them together (with permission to reject and re-choose if a block is too similar to the previous block). That would be faster but I'm not quite sure I can bring myself to do that; it's not enough control over the finished product.

I did start cutting on the next quilt after I finished the blocks (I didn't have the energy to consider laying them out, and I still couldn't quite bring myself to do the random-grab method).

I chose to do the sort-of-four-patch, sort-of-trip-around-the-world quilt next. This one uses some of the current Mary Engelbreit line (mostly those characteristic "circle" flowers she does) in red, light green, and yellow. I like the color combination; it looks kind of "vintage" to me (in the sense of being mid-century vintage, about the era when my house was built). I have all the fabric for this quilt (except a backing, and I might splurge for this one and buy a big piece of one of the Mary Engelbreit fabrics for it. I think they are still available even though I bought these a few months ago). What I like about the quilt is that most of the piecing is fairly quick BUT you aren't sewing 44" strips to other 44" strips, which gets tedious.

I might do the cutting for this, and then, if I'm still in a "cutting" mood, cut the fabrics for the dog-print quilt I want to do for Project Linus. That will be a quick one with NO layout, because I'm using a very limited fabric palette; once the blocks are done I can just stack them up because the order will be four patch A, plain block, four-patch B.

But now, I have to change the sheets on my bed, and then I'm going to read on some of the accumulated scientific journal articles I have stacked up. And probably knit on the current "simple" socks while I read.