Power outage

This morning while having my tea I was adding the white hexagons to the fourth floret for the top row of my hexagon quilt.  I was contemplating what to do this day.  It's my son's birthday today.  I knew we had plans to take him out to dinner and stuff, but aside from that there was not much planned.

I had decided that I needed a break from quilting a quilt and decided that I was going to sew up the three piles of bow ties sitting beside my machine.  I cleaned up and folded the pleated log cabin quilt, ironed the small pieces of fabric I recently washed and overall tidied up before turning on the machine.  Just as I was ready to start, the power goes off.  The first thing I thought was that I had too much on and cut the power, but when I realized that I only had my radio and one light on, I thought oh no!

It wasn't just me.  The power in the area had just gone off.  Oh well. I guess there will be no sewing just yet.  I switch gears and decided to cut up material.  While I am making a quilt there are often cut offs and miscellaneous bits and pieces.  I usually try and take care of them right away, but if not I have a basket on my cutting table that I put them in, until I have the time.

Well, with the power out, I guess I have the time.  Power was out from about 9:30 am until about 1:00 pm.  My son is outside playing with his friend, my daughter is going to work and hubby is going out for a bit.  A good long time to cut.  And look at that.....I can see the bottom of the basket!!!  Yay for me!  I haven't seen the bottom of the basket for a good long time.

The basket was starting to spill over the top.  What did I get out of it?  A lot.  I cut out 75 red squares for the Texas Braid quilt that I plan to make from one of Bonnie's books, 300 dark 2" x 5" rectangles and 252 light 2" x 5" rectangles, for the same quilt.  If the piece of cut off material was not big enough for the 5" strip, I would cut it into 2" squares or 1 1/2" squares.  I got approx. three dark 2" square piles the size seen in the picture below, two light 2" piles as well as an equal amount of piles for the light and dark 1 1/2" squares.

Very productive.  Unfortunately I need 1080 red squares and 1080 each of the light and dark rectangle strips.  I am not even half way there, but that is ok as I am not ready to start this one yet.  For now when ever I have left over cut offs, I will automatically cut them to these 5" strips.  Eventually, without much effort I will, accumulate enough.  By that time, maybe I will be ready to start sewing it.  The process of taking care of my scraps as I make them helps to save time later, keeps things clean and breaks up the job of cutting, into small manageable bits of time.  The only dilemma is "what" quilt to make, to determine what sizes of units I need.