Knitting and I Need to Quit Stalling

I have been working on cleaning up my yarn stash and making decisions on old projects - should they be finished or "frogged". And I need to find a new project for a 2 week vacation. Criteria is one yarn, who wants to manage multiple balls of yarn for color work, and reasonably easy pattern for car knitting. This is turning out to be a challenge. I have made several swatches and nothing has risen to the top.

So what have I really been doing - making dish cloths. I found an overflowing box of small balls of cotton yarn. My goal was to make the dishcloths until the top would fit on the box. Well 8 dishcloths later.........  I even used some yarn from 2 dresses that I made for my granddaughter. They were too worn out to lengthend (I made new ones) but I could not just throw out usable yarn. So they went into the mix.

Now I need to get back to my yarn search. I have a week to make a decision.

It's Finally Done!!!!

And it is huge!!! I could not even find a place to take a full picture, so here is is, wrinkles and all. This is large enough for a king bed with a very generous overhang.

This was quite the process. My idea and first execution was not what I wanted, so many blocks needed to be remade. I still am not really happy with the size of the white lines. But another thing I learned is that small pieces and narrow lines result in a quilt where at least 1/3 of the fabric is in the seam allowances. Something to keep in mind for large quilts.

I struggled with the final arrangement of the blocks. And asked on Ravelry and Facebook for opinions. Overwhelming the vote was for the alternating vertical/horizontal arrangement. Funny,  this was my least favorite arrangement. But I started playing with the blocks and came up with this. Vertical/horizontal but offset. I did the offset partly because I didn't like the formal block arrangement and thinking that it would make it easier to sew at the corners where the 4 blocks would meet.



Close up of block arrangement



Another problem was figuring out the actual block placement. This quilt is almost 10 feet wide!! My design wall is only 4 feet wide. I don't have a king bed, no indoor floor space, and the deck is covered in snow. I found out real quick that value could be a problem and the yellow blocks needed to be replaced with a dark gold. (Quick shopping trip needed!)  I finally gave up agonizing about the color arrangement and pretty much randomly lined them up.

So it is what it is and is now on it's way to the long arm quilter. I think the quilting will really unify all the different colors.

What will I do next? I want to do more on the mosaic theme. I have a lot of scraps left over and will work on something which fits on my design wall.

AND the white will be lines and not shapes.

Now I need to clean up the fabric piles and knitting sounds really good. I need to work on some Comfort Bears for the local police department.