A Miscellany--Color Names, Quilt Blocks, Notebook

These are ten more dashes pinned and ready to stitch.  It's not often I stop to notice the colors in a stack of quilt block parts.  These delighted me!

When they're stitched, I will have a total of 42 churn dash blocks.  Enough, or will I need more?  It will depend on the layout, which I'll have to start considering soon.  And the size.  These will finish at 8 3/4".

We had a little accident in the sewing room last week that required washing some fabrics. I almost threw these red scraps away and would have if they'd been poor quality.  I hadn't realized there were so many.  I've been wondering what block I could make with them.  Log cabins or log cabin centers?  Tiny nine-patches?  Or...? (The orange fabrics will become zinnias.)

As I was pressing I was thinking of the names we use for colors, specifically the lighter, pale colors.
We say light blue or robin's egg blue or sky blue.
We say light yellow, pale yellow, or cream.
We say light green or mint green.
But I've never, ever heard anyone say light red or pale red.  Have you?  It's always pink.  Why do you suppose that is?

And last, have you ever used a disc notebook?  For quilting notes I've always used an 8½" x 11" spiral notebook with a light grid on it, but one day I saw someone with a discbound notebook which caught my attention.  There are several companies that make these including The Happy Planner, ARC by Staples, Levinger, and a few others.  This will be a phone notebook.

The discs are little solid plastic circles with a ridge around the edges, which is what holds the paper in place.

The discs require holes that look like these.

A week or so after I discovered this style of notebook and after I'd bought some discs, I found a hole punch at the thrift store on half-price day for a whopping $3.00.  It's a hefty gadget weighing nearly four pounds and can punch 10 pages at a time or a thick cardboard.  So I punched and put together the note book, above, from a blank book whose cover I didn't like.

The advantages I see to a notebook like this are

• Pages can be easily moved and new pages can be punched and inserted wherever.  (Maybe you, too, make quilting notes on random pieces of paper that never seem to find a home or get to where they should be?)  
• The discs seem to hold the paper securely:  nothing falls out when I pick up the notebook by just one cover.  
• There's nearly no shifting of the pages as there is in a traditional 3-ring binder.   
• The covers and pages can be folded back-to-back, open or closed, to lay flat, unlike a 3-ring binder.
  

I really love the idea of being able to easily organize pages--finished quilts, in progress quilts, future quilts, quilt ideas, etc.  My spiral notebooks now have pages for both finished and unfinished quilts and they are a disorganized mishmash.  I know, that wouldn't happen if I finished my quilts in the order I started them.  Ha!

So, have any of you (or even anyone you know) ever used a notebook like this?  If so, what do you think?  Did you like it or not?  Were there problems with it?

I wish you all the best.
--Nancy.