Orca Bay Mystery 2

I'm nearly finished with step 2 of Bonnie Hunter's Orca Bay Mystery quilt.  I've been string piecing these little 3.5" blocks on squares cut from an old phone book, and it works very well as a foundation.  I still have about 10 to go of the 72 required.  You can also see the hourglass units from step 1 on the left.  Making this quilt so far has been all happy playing with scraps... just what I like about quilting.

I had already cleared out a lot of my blue scraps when I pieced the Framed In quilt top (still in the queue waiting for machine quilting), so many of these had to be cut from my boxes of blues, which wasn't a problem.  I'm going to be converting some of my smaller pieces into strips and squares using Bonnie's Scrap User's system, but that will be a long-term project.  Eventually my fat quarter boxes will just have fat quarters in them, and not the smallish scraps that clutter them up now.

If any of you have been following the amazing story of Katie, the 9-year-old adopted from Eastern Europe weighing less than 11 pounds, check out this post from her new family on her progress.  It will warm your heart. If you haven't yet read her story, have a box of tissues handy.