I ‘rescued’ a package of 7 fat quarters last year from a dusty shelf at Tuesday Morning.  The colors were fun, but the fabric was not the best. However the price, and the desire to buy fabric at the moment overtook me, and into my basket went this $5.00 bargain.

As is normal for me, the fabric was washed as soon as I got it home.  And of course, it shrank, it raveled, and it revealed a fair amount of fading along the fold lines.

So, it was relegated to The Pile.  I picked it up last weekend, when I needed something quilt-y to do at our Saturday meeting.  Since I wasn’t planning on sewing yet (recovering from foot surgery), I needed a plan.  I gathered a handful of books and grabbed that fabric.

I decided I would make a charity quilt with the fabric. Simple shapes, nothing with points that may not take well to the quality of material, and of course, I didn’t want it to end up as another UFO, so it needed to be a day project.

Today was the day.  Foot feeling better, I put the machine back on the desk, pulled out the strips I cut last week and went to it. I had chosen as my INSPIRATION  the quilt called Funny Farm

in Karen Snyder’s book Fat Quarter Fun.

I knew immediately upon seeing it that it satisfied the criteria I had established. I also knew that the pattern was very much going to be about inspiration and very little about following the directions. Instead of the same color background, I chose the ‘almost’ solids.  I knew I wouldn’t be able to replicate the tessellation perfectly because of that, so I planned to use a fabric to separate the rows.

Strip piecing 2.5 inch strips.Cut into 4.5 inch squares.

Resembled into blocks. (Here, I didn’t pay attention to the order I worked, and so ended up making one set reversed, but I wasn’t stopping to fix, since I wasn’t planning on a tessellation anyway.

(What they would look like, tessellated.)

The finished top.

This is a nice baby sized quilt.  7 fat quarters! One afternoon!