Decisions needed to be made, but you know the old saw, "when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping." As far as I'm concerned, those are words to live by.

A couple friends and I spent last Saturday road-tripping the quilt shop circuit around a quadrant of Wisconsin. We stopped at variety of shops, just the sort of itinerary to recharge batteries. First was Holly & Ivy in Ripon, primarily a wool and basket shop.

We decided we would make the trip in a heartbeat if Holly & Ivy offers a class on this basket.


Next was the wonderful Primitive Gatherings quilt shop in Menasha. Finally, we stopped at Yarns by Design in Neenah. A well-rounded shopping experience--hitting all our interests and scratching the itches that needed scratching.



For me, this was an *emergency* shopping trip. I was burning to come up with some solutions to the current quilting issues boxing me in the corner. And success--I found fabric to inspire new directions on my stalled strippy, and at least two other projects.

The answer for the strippy came in the form of an antique-y brown and blue striped fabric at Primitive Gatherings that did a much better job of picking up and uniting the colors on the block strips I had made.




I've also decided to make the strippy smaller. It will be a wall quilt. The toile is gone--that will be a different project. And I decided that as much as I like things made small, the endless lengths of tiny half-square triangles I've made are just too dinky for the quilt as it had been planned. I think the HSTs will look much better on a slightly smaller-scaled quilt.

One very astute commenter mentioned my original quilt plan as having some proportion issues. She was absolutely right. I'm hoping this new direction will solve some of those issues.