Newest Baby Quilt

 
Image: A baby quilt made of flannel squares of periwinkle (blue) and red and a while pattern (with kitties, but you can't see that very well in this picture.)

Over the dead week between Christmas and New Years, I unearthed a quilt I'd started right after my nephew Jonathan's baby was born. Initially I was not fond of it. I thought that the blue, in particular, was a bit dull. I even started piecing something else together, but Shawn encouraged me to take another look at this one. When I pulled it out and laid it out, not only did I realize that I had it nearly finished, but also that I didn't hate the combination as much as I thought I did. So, went back to it and am now nearly done with it. This quilt is entirely flannel, so it is really warm and soft.

As I was telling spiderplanet in the comments yesterday, we try to limit our fabric purchases...or, at least, reuse/buy cheap. So, the only fabric that I bought new for this quilt is the white kitty squares. To be fair, we have A LOT of fabric already around the house thanks to the fact that Shawn makes rag rugs. Any time someone on our neighborhood "Buy Nothing" group offers up old sheets, we're first in line to try to snag them. We also have gone to our local GoodWill outlet and bought fabric at pennies on the pound (literally. I believe they sell at 15-20 cents a pound? It's something insanely cheap like that.)  The stuff from GoodWill starts life as shirts or sheets, but we as much of the fabric as we can. We have also made friends with other sewers who will give us their scraps after mask making or re-upholstery work. We try to be end users of fabric. The bottom feeders of the fabric food chain, as it were. The sewers of the sewers. :-)

In other news, I got to a section of Duolingo where they are finally teaching me the important stuff, like, "My friends and I are otaku," and "My gamer brother is a complete noob." Very important. It's only taken me, what? Three years to get this far?? (I've been studying Japanese far longer, but I think I've only been on Duo for three years. I have yet to make more than a 60 day streak, however. I'm not good at daily practice.)