Stop me before I piece again!

My friend Dorinda has corrupted me. She got me started on the One-Block-Wonder pieced quilts and I did a few of those, then she showed me the Northwind block and I came home with a copy of those instructions, and now I'm dreaming in pieced blocks! Arrrgggghhhhh......doesn't my brain know I don't piece!??!! And since NOTHING can ever be easy, or simple, or straightforward with me, I'm dreaming Y-SEAMS. Not just sewing stuff together but having to do little fiddly precise stuff! Oh well, once it gets in my head it will either make me crazy by not leaving enough room for anything else, or I have to just suck it up and make the damn thing. This one is sort of an attic window/shadow box thing (whichever one uses the contrast sashing) but of course I had to make the sizes of the boxes varied so I spent about 3 hours graphing the thing off so the blocks all fit together. And then I chose a scrap of fabric from my friend Vicki in Miami without giving any thought to how much I needed. I just cut it in half and over-dyed half of it for the contrast. Top that off with the fact that it frays VERY badly (give thanks to the god of fusible interfacing) and is slippery and was already cut in a weird shape since it was a scrap to begin with. Can you see where this is going yet? I got down to the last three 2.5"x2.5" pieces I needed and guess what? ALL I had left were the little ears I cut off making the mitered corner strips. Vicki almost got the panicked fabric emergency call about 5:00 this morning, but I rummaged around in my own scrap basket and found one last piece of it that had originally been the facing of the blouse she was originally going to use it for. I had to fussy cut the last 3 pieces, but I managed to eke out EXACTLY as much as I needed. This one will most likely have a bunch of embellishing on it to be used as a sample for the program I'm doing in June. Unless I sell it first. Um, yeah. Like that's gonna happen. I may even break down and do some sashiko quilting on it. Fancy threads count as embellishing don't they? OH GOD! Did I just mention hand quilting in the same breath as piecing? Good lord I must be regressing. Don't most people start with patterns and then move on to art quilts?

This is about 1/3 of the total quilt and no two fabrics in the boxes are the same. Still have no clue what I'll do for borders yet but there's time for that later. Probably something plain if I decide to do the sashiko.

And this month's Fast Friday challenge was fun. The theme was monochromatic, based on a color from a song. I used Sonny Landreth's South of I-10, which has the line "...grew up on Clifton and Cleveland and the Red Hot Louisiana Band" in it, so I did a dancer in red. It's all done with thread painting on cotton fabrics and I'm probably going to add a black border on the right side and at the bottom. But I was happy with the movement I got from the stitching and shape of the woman. I think this is only the second mono piece I've ever done, too. The other one was In the Ghetto, which I also liked, but I have to have color 99% of the time.