Moving It Forward Monday: Focus is Still on Quiltville "Cotton Boll" and "Cherry Crunch"

Having carried  "Roll, Roll, Cotton Boll" and "Cherry Crunch" forward from the holiday season and the first of the year,  the good news is now the construction of the blocks are finally starting to feel less like a slog and more "in flow".   

I've worked up a system whereby I sit down with pieces for both and leader/ender them until the "stack of the day" is done.  It generally takes about an hour and a half, much longer if I am interrupted by going to look up things I've seen in the You Tube videos I usually have playing in the background.

At this point I've sewn all the HST triangle sets I had die cut for "Cotton Boll" awhile back into the five piece strips needed for the blocks.

However, at that time I just cut up bits of fabric I had on hand but that did not yield all the pieced strips I need.  I will now need to die cut more HST sets to make the strips for rest of the blocks I need to make.  Speaking of the blocks,  I also got the first of those made up during the leader/ender sessions too.

They are just so vibrant sitting here by themselves!  I don't know how Bonnie came up with this design but it is a real beaut.  As noted before, these will be set on point and alternated with the string squares that I resumed work on during the Fall and Christmas season and finished up last month.

Regarding "Cherry Crunch":  I've been steadily sewing together the string strip units that I had attached red corner triangles to and have gone from this:

....to this.

I need to make two more rows of blocks for the size layout I want.  If all goes well, the center of this quilt top could be completed by week's end.

At that point I'll be hitting the red stash again for strips for the red piano key outer borders that finish off the top.  Actually since I need the red HSTs for "Cotton Boll" too, I'll probably do a session where I pull from the stash to cut things for both.  This will also be an opportunity for re-organizing that stash and deciding if there are any more "red focused" quilts I want to either kit right now or make in the near future.

So what's the bad news?  Getting in the groove for all of this has been a way to avoid the two deadline (let's call them "promised") projects I should be working on, justified by the fact I've managed to keep these two moving forward at a good pace.  With these moving smoothly, it's time to push myself to face the other two.  If history serves, I'll probably find out that I was panicking about working on them for nothing.  Or at least I hope so!