Quilt squares

Hi friends!  I'm glad to be back amongst you all again!  Rich had his Christmas break planned out with some things he wanted to get done.  That was fine and dandy with me because I told him I had a plan too... catch up on my blog reading.  So I spent the past two weeks reading about 500 posts and catching up with you all.  I have never, ever seen my Google Reader so bare!  Now I enjoy blogging again.  =]

Before I get into what this post is about, I just want to say that you all have turned into some of my most treasured and loyal friends.  I appreciate you and love you all!  I'm thankful that I can come here happy and you are happy with me, sad and you are sad for me, asking for prayer and you are there.  THANK YOU for being that kind of friend to me these past couple of years.  What a joy and a blessing it is to share life with you all!

Now that the sappy stuff is outta the way, let's get down to quilting, hehe.  I am not a quilter.  But my friend Katie over at Willow Creek Homestead and I went to an outside sale that her dad was having.  Katie's dad holds these sales for charity.  All the money is donated to wildfire victims in his area.  We had an outburst of wildfires last year and many lost their homes.  Jim was blessed to not lose anything although the fires came up to his place and burned most of his land.  Now he is helping his neighbors that lost everything.  One of the things that we picked up was a huge box of quilt pieces and squares.  We sat down and went through it piece by piece, splitting the whole box.  Here is my stash:

Even splitting it up, I ended up with almost 70 squares of various sizes plus 2 full quilt tops!

My favorite are these smaller 7.5" squares that are going to make some adorable little pillows.  One of Rich's buddy at work is bringing him a bag of sawdust for me tonight, yippee!

Just look at this stack!

There were about 4 different sizes of squares, lots of blues.

These are the 2 full quilt tops.  Not sure what I am going to do with these yet.  I have a friend that has a long arm quilting machine so I'll probably be visiting her.  =]

I'm not sure of the age but the squares are definitely hand stitched and made out of old clothes.  You can tell that most of them were made from men's shirts.

Oh, and I forgot to count how many diamonds there were because I already had them in the sink getting a bath.

Now I'm asking advice from you.  I probably did this wrong so PLEASE correct me if I did.  I'll take all the critique and advice you want to give.  =]  To clean these pieces, I put them a sink of hot water with Dawn dish soap.  I stirred it occasionally, soaking for an hour.  Then I soaked them in hot water to rinse.  That's what the above picture is from (you can even see the steam in some areas).  They were very, very dingy.  Then I'm going to put them in the dryer on delicate for a bit.  I'm wondering if maybe they should be washed and rinsed in cold water?  What do you all do?  Please help!  =/

Thanks for stopping in for a visit.  I appreciate you coming by.

Have a delightful week~