At our guild’s January meeting every year we have our De-Stash. Members bring any quilting related or other craft items that they want to get rid of. The items are put out on tables and the members get to pick through them and take home anything that they want. Any unclaimed items at the end of the night are donated to a local thrift shop that benefits a Women’s shelter.

About three years ago during De-Stash, I picked up a large ziplock bag of pieced triangles and some 2.5 inch strips from a jelly roll. I pulled out the triangles and tried to piece them into hexagons. The piecing wasn’t the best by the original quilter so piecing together into hexagons was a frustrating exercise. I finally gave up on that idea and just started to randomly piece them together in an improv fashion. Once I had a large unit pieced together, I trimmed it square into a block. This is the resulting quilt top. The blue sashing strips were in my stash. The Moda fabric on the border was something I picked up at last year’s De-Stash night.

This quilt top was made from the 2.5 inch jelly roll strips that were in that ziplock bag. I pieced string blocks and then put them together with the beige tone on tone fabric from my stash to make string pieced half square triangle blocks. I played with the placement of the blocks until I got a layout that I liked given the number of blocks that I had.

The COVID-19 pandemic has prevented us from attending in-person guild sew-ins since March. For the last two Friday nights I have hosted Zoom sew-ins for members of our guild from 6 pm to 10 pm. These on-line sew-ins have been well attended which confirms that our membership is craving social interaction. These sew-ins have proved productive for me and have jump started my quilting again. I finished putting these two tops together to the flimsy stage during these sew-ins.