The little red painted dresser in my room has been piled high with reading material and old shopping receipts for most of the summer since I finished painting it 6 months ago. In a burst of new school year/fresh start enthusiasm, yesterday I decided to get busy on making a dresser scarf for it. A pretty covering for this little numbers has been on my to-do list for quite some time.

I have a bad habit of leaving wood furniture without protection. Frequently, after a visit from my mother, I will find a lovely plastic table mat over such items. She never says anything, but I will walk into the room to find a ghastly white or tiny pink flowered “present” in her wake.  I know she means well, and I know it’s better than screaming at my housemates about wet glasses on tabletops, but I hate plastic! The dresser in question has escaped mom’s protective instincts because it has been so cluttered. Since it’s time to declutter, I will need to distract myself by sewing and thinking about decluttering. Am I alone here?

Anyway, with a new dresser scarf firmly in my thoughts, I pulled down several of my quilt design books, but didn’t find anything that felt right. So I worked on a design of my own.

My first sketch featured yellow and red stars on a ‘night sky’ background of blacks, blues and purples – I think that will do. I’ve been itching to comb through my 2.5” scraps, so I sorted the appropriate colors and then cut out three 4.5” squares as the center of a trio of saw tooth stars. I want to vary the size of the stars and I might vary the block patterns too.

After I finished these beauties, I decided to use my 1.5” square scraps to create a few red stars, but I think that our closest star was too blistering hot on a humid August Sunday afternoon to make that any fun (how on earth did I sew that picnic quilt using all those little pieces???). I just couldn’t fidget with them this weekend.

So, it’s back to the design board today, before mom notices the bare wood surface awaiting her design touches.