I get bored easily

Yesterday, it hit me. The need to make yet another quilt top. I need it really. I need a quilt that's small enough to carry around every week to quilting bee. I need a project that's easy to work on at someone else's house - no keeping track of bazillions of little beads, vials, different colored silamide thread... Like that.

Can't actually quilt on my already-started-the-quilting-on quilt, because that one takes thinking, not just soothing quilting in a known pattern. It's actually been so long since I have quilted on that particular project, "Space For Rent," that I actually had to go dig it out of the closet just to see what it was. Ah, a liberated houses with space aliens quilt. I remember that. I forgot how much fun it is. Should really finish that one day. But not now.

Now I want to just quilt freehand fans, no thinking, no worrying. Soothing quilting. I need that sometimes. Guilt would not let me spend much time creating a top (should be working on sampler) so I threw this one together:

If you didn't know better, you might think I'd spent time piecing or appliquing the center, but actually that is just one chunk of Nancy Wolff fabric that my friend Siobhan bought for me. Since May I have been gazing on this fabric, trying to figure out how to use it most effectively. The motifs are so close together that I would have to slice through and use up half the motifs in order to get any whole ones. So I just went ahead and cut out a chunk of the fabric and added the borders. Voila. Still have some of the fabric left so if I do decide to make variable wonky stars with these guys in the center of the block, I still can.

My husband asked, couldn't you have cut it so that WHOLE heads showed up - he objects to the left and lower sides. No, I obviously couldn't. I used the fabric as it was, just eliminating selvage. The bottom bit was at an angle, and the top maybe too after I cut it, so I added bigger inner borders on top and bottom, then squared the darn thing up. (I am so pathetically bad at squaring, which is why I don't stress out about it, and make it a virtue to not square whenever possible. This is squarish enough.) Attached the borders with my patented non-measuring technique (lay it on and pin, cut off excess). Didn't bother with squaring up the outer borders - they're square enough and quilting will distort it more anyway.

Am now quilting my beloved fans using regular black quilting thread. This project might actually look good with just a cross-hatch grid, but I did that last quilt I made and I got thoroughly bored. I happen to like the fans, both making them and looking at them. So there. If it turns out the fans look bad over the faces, I can switch to the cross-hatch then and still have my fans circling the border.