Sunshine strings top done!

Thank you everyone for your extremely helpful comments on my last post! The Liberated Quilters group had a virtual retreat today, so I took advantage of that to make more strip sets for the border and to use in the second top (more on that later).
I trimmed all the blocks to make them fit perfectly so I would be less tempted to stretch a bias edge, and of course I overtrimmed one of them. Took me a bit to deal with that complication, but otherwise it went pretty smoothly. Better than that, it was fun!
And for the second top -- I'm going to use the hourglass blocks I showed yesterday in a column down the left side, a row of 3" blocks like the ones above across the bottom, and the rest of the quilt will have sets of Chinese coins using these strings. I should be able to use all the waste pieces from this quilt plus all the animal strings I've cut. I'm excited about it!

Sunshine strings

Susan at Hanging On by a Needle and Thread just took a class from Ami Simms -- the same class Ami gave when she visited my guild a year ago. It inspired me to pull out my almost finished project from that class and finish it. As Ami says, the babies are cold.
I used strings from animal fabrics donated for Project Linus quilts (and this quilt will be donated), but decided to make the blocks bigger than Ami suggested so the strips could be wide enough to see the animals a little better. Because I didn't think it through carefully, I thought a 9" yellow strip would give me 9" block. But duh, it gives me a 12" block! That's a lot of blank yellow space.
I sought to liven up the quilt a bit by using the waste pieces (my miscalculation gave me lots!) to make an interesting border. I was also hoping that the quilter might practice some clever quilting in the yellow, or I thought I might cut some animals out of fabric and do a little brodie perse in the blank spaces.
But it occurred to me I could cut each block in half on the diagonal (I have more blocks than are on the design wall) and reassemble them as shown above to chop up the yellow space. But since I hadn't planned on doing that, I would now end up with bias edges on all sides, eek! I could stay stitch the edges and sew carefully. Would that be ok? Any thoughts on what I should do would be welcome!
Also sewed some blocks using pieces from a fabric exchange. These are for Bonnie Hunter's Sticks and Stones quilt. I have been getting my sewing area cleaned up by folding, stacking, organizing, and stitching UFO's. It has gotten my creative juices flowing and I have lots of ideas. Finishing up these projects so I can move on will feel great!

Fabric choices

The plan is to piece THUMP tomorrow. The previous plan had been to piece it today, but I'm stuck on fabric choices. Any advice?
The orange is my background, and I had thought about doing a different black with white dots for each letter, but I didn't have enough. Going from left to right, I like the first one, find the second one too regular, I like the third and think it would add interest because of the varying density of dots (or it might just be distracting), the fourth is one of my all-time favorite B&W fabrics, and the fifth...well...it isn't dotted but has a crackled look that says Halloween to me. Here's a close-up:
I would make all the letters with this crackly one but I think the contrast with the orange may not be great enough. So currently I'm leaning towards using only one fabric, either fabric 3 or 4, but every time I go to cut strips, I waffle. Please, advise!

And I have another fabric dilemma. I'm making big strip sets of blues, which will be cut into wonky squares and re-assembled. It's for a quilt for my family room, which is done in brights (yes, it's my family room, so what else would you expect?), with yellow walls and a red sofa and red, blue, green and yellow in the curtains and art and even one piece of furniture. The plan had been to intersperse bits of brights (reds, yellows, greens) among the reassembled pieces, but now I'm wondering. Here's a starting piece:
As I sew, it calls out to me, "I am the ocean, the waves, the sea...I am the sparkling blue Mediterranean...I dance with the sunshine..." and all I can see is bits of yellow playing with it, not red. Guess I will cut it and play around to see, but I need to get something up in my family room after a year of promising to do so.


For a complete change of topic, here are the earrings I'm wearing today. I love them. When I put them on this morning, I realized how quilty they are, though I bought them long before I became a quilter. Perhaps a careful observer would have foreseen it in my future...

Finally, I thought this was interesting.

If word verification drives you crazy (as DH would say, it's a short trip!), you might want to read this article in the New York Times. Seems we might have some interesting new security procedures in our future. Oops, I see blogger has cut off the upside down parrot part of the picture -- you definitely have to read the article now!