Playing with leaves

I don't have a whole lot to say about Saturday, really. My mom was gone part of the time, and while she was gone I raided her stash because I needed greens, and I forgot to bring any (it's certainly not that I am lacking in greens, believe me - it's just that I'm ADD girl and I forget everything) - I couldn't find her main box of green but I found the Christmas fabric, which had enough usable greens to do the job. All it takes to make a leaf block is one strip - 2x12" will do - of colored fabric. (And an equal amount of background. But I have plenty of background.) When my mom got back she said that most of her greens were in a box under the daybed - I had looked under there but apparently it was in the back and I didn't dig deep enough. And of course she didn't mind me taking the fabric; I knew that or I wouldn't have taken it in the first place. She ended up giving me a couple of strips from the fabric she's using to make the table runner, too - I didn't touch that because I didn't know for sure that she didn't need all of it.

I also washed fabric while she was gone - the bee where we're doing the batik trade is this week and I needed to cut it and before that it needed to be washed. So while I was at it I washed all the fabric I'd bought lately from the retreat and eBay and the Painted Pony trip last week.

I needed 20 blocks (16 for the body of the quilt and the 4 for the corners of the border) and I wasted enough time looking for fabric and washing and ironing that I didn't get all 20 done. I did 13, most of which are green. I rearranged a little and double-checked, and what's left to do is 1 orange and 6 reds. That's it.

Right now the four corner blocks are green. I was thinking that I could change that, if I cared to, but I have to make up my mind before I start sewing all those blocks together. The way the colors radiate out from the center, the inner diamond (yellow) has 4 blocks, the 2nd row (greens) has 8 and the one after that has 12, and so on. (It keeps going until you get to the edge of the quilt and then it starts diminishing again until you get out to 8 and then 4 again at the corners. I had to count to be sure this was right, but it is.) So if I changed the 2nd row with the 3rd row - which I think is red - I would need 12 and I could use up those extra 4 greens for that, and then I'd have 4 reds left for the corners instead. I may try it to see how it looks. The reason I'm not sure I want green leaves in the corners is because I don't know yet what color the borders are going to be. I should have decided all this before I made the 4 extra green blocks, but obviously I didn't. Anyway, that gives me 2 choices and I'm pretty sure one of them will be fine. (It's also possible that I could do some further exchanging and end up with extra orange instead, or even yellow. I haven't done the mental gymnastics to be sure that would work, though.)