Fiberecycled or Disliking orphans is un-Amur'can.

Everybody loves an orphan right? Cute, rejects of society that they are. Orphaned kids and animals are easy to love. Somehow I've ended up with a penchant for acquiring orphaned objects. Yes, I know, it is a disease. But at least I'm not bringing home random street children and trying to strip and refinish them.

It is in this orphan theme that I'm working on a quilt.

In this fabric stash I've been sorting I found boxes and boxes of parts to already finished quilts. I'm not sure if they were just extras. Sometimes you think a piece will work, until you see it all pinned together. Maybe she decided to just never finish a project and scrapped the whole thing to be canalized for other crafts. Maybe as part of the dementia she decided that what she really needed at the end of days was totes and totes of size graded squares and strips of fabric all organized by color and pattern and individually bagged. No, I'm not kidding and, yes, other people have confirmed the existence of said totes.

Either way unless you know the original plan for these, it's a little hard to know what to do with them.
My solution, randomness. Debag about 6 or so packs of 1.5" squares along with the 1.5" strips and sew strip, square, strip, square ad infinitum until I have a large line of fabric. Then sew these into a large rectangle that looks like a waterfall of stripes. Sort of.
My next crazy idea was that this should be a messenger bag. Throw on Buffy, pay ZERO attention to what you are doing and suddenly the rectangle of fabric is umm a bit large for a duffel bag much less a messenger bag. Decide that there are too many duffel bags in the world and to make one of those draw string backpack things is just too Shepherdstown Hippie Chic for my mood at the moment.
New plan. Skirt, no. Dog bed, nah. Scrap the whole thing into the bin, NEVER! Would you throw away a string of orphan children that someone had tied together? No, I think not. You'd find something productive to do with them even if it was just to hold your parking space. The next guy would have to be a real meanie to boot orphans out of their only parking space in the world just so he could have a shorter walk.

But I digress... a lot.

So we have this largish waterfall looking stripey thing. That REALLY needs to be ironed. Get out iron and then curse a lot and remember why one does NOT wait until the end to iron quiltish pieces. Swear to never do small piece work again and promptly sew a 4 inch wide solid border all around the blasted piecework and say ironing be damned.

Glance at boxes and boxes if itty bitty squares. Glance at iron. Decide that quilt (as it has somehow now become a quilt) needs a border ALL around with tiny tiny itty bitty squares.
Decide that it won't be so bad if I just do a couple at a time. Sit down and sew all of them all at once and confirm that original plan of a few at a time was a better one.

I'm now at the point where I'm a little tired of looking at it and still happen to have all the rest of the ball of strips sewn together that made the original waterfall thingy. Hmm, what else can we do. Another border! So, I'm currently working on making a border of horizontal stripes to go around the whole thing to contrast the vertical stripes in the center. Before I can attach them I have to 1) finish making them and 2) find a solid border to go between the border of tiny tiny microscopic squares and this new border of strips. Am thinking solid border may be two toned. Maybe pumpkin and navy or gold and navy.

We shall see.