My 2016 Kit Conundrum

One of my resolutions stated in my quilting goals for 2016 was,
     Assess my kits stash; limit impulse kit purchases to two maximum in 2016.
It was a rather stupid goal. Goals should be to do something, not to not do something.

Being optimistic, I had not figured out nor elaborated on what I would do if I had not met this goal and the year was not yet over. How do you undo doing something in order to still be able to achieve a goal? I had to rethink. The spirit of the goal was kit reduction. I needed to decrease my stash quilt kits by sewing up, giving away, or repurposing more than I had bought. See how good I am at rationalizing and wriggling out of something?

Well, I have bought three kits, sewn up two, and repurposed a third so I guess I am dead even, although counting the repurposing as a completion may be cheating a bit. I repurposed a kit titled Tessellation Zigzag. I recognize that my original purchase incentive had been the clearance markdown price. The kit was priced at less money than the fabric alone cost would have cost, plus it included a pattern. I liked the primary colorway and the concept of tessellation has always intrigued me. The kit has been sitting in my closet for years, I do not know exactly how long ago, but at least as far back as when fabric was around $8 per yard.

These were the fabrics that came in the kit.

There was a half yard of eight of them and a fat quarter of the purple. I folded each in my standard configuration for storage and segregated the batiks, on the right.

The one yard of batik fabric included for the wide border is really wild!

Then I opened up and read the pattern and had a bonus surprise. The pattern was for a paper-less chain paper-piecing technique that I did not know existed and to which I had never been exposed. I am curious to try it! Lesson learned: explore those kits that you buy for "someday" as soon as you get them. You may be seduced into doing them sooner.

I love the look of batiks but I am not a fan of working with them. I once bound a quilt with a batik and the weave was so tight I had to buy special needles to puncture it. My poor fingers hurt so from sewing on the binding by hand. As many years as I have sewn, I have never been able to get used to using a thimble. I will be sure not deploy any of these batiks as a binding fabric.

I have repurposed kits in the past. Here is one from a kit of batik fat quarters. I titled it Color Play of the Day's and blogged about its completion in my July 13, 2013 post.  The original kit is shown on the left with a French Braid pattern. I used all thirty fat quarters contained in the kit but with a totally different pattern, Dash in the Box from A Quilter's Dream. My repurposed version is shown on the right. It is the quilt with the batik binding that did in my fingers.

The three quilt kits I bought this year are Hedge Maze to expose me to Kaffe Fassett prints, Pixie Sticks to initiate me to using solids, and a study in blue and white Dresden Plate variation that will absolutely go with my living room couch. I had a reason to buy each - not just  the lure of a low price.

The two that I completed are Overlapping Squares 48" x 48" (June 8, 2016) and Orange and Grey 40" x 50" (August 10, 2016)

So now I have three and a half months to reduce my kits stash. With the busy holiday season, will I be able to sew up another kit... especially since I have master bedroom and family room drapes ahead of a kit project on my to-do-next list? Quite a kit conundrum. Aha! I have an idea. My daughter is a quilter. Perhaps I can gift her a quilt kit for Christmas, reducing my stash by one! Oh, no! What if she gifts me a quilt kit for Christmas?

I better get to sewing, not blogging. Right after I check out Let's Bee Social #142. Things there are happy, happy, happy this week!