De-cluttering and distracted sewing

Yesterday I posted about cleaning out an old box of cookbooks - and I'm happy to say it is done!!  I saved 4 books that I thought my girls might find interesting, mailed a church cookbook to a friend in my hometown who attended that church, boxed up all the rest that were in good shape and threw away a few that were very dirty.  The back seat of my car is full of miscellaneous stuff to donate and those are going to be dropped off after lunch today.

I also started shredding some old receipts and bank records found in the file cabinet.  My shredder gets overheated and quits after about 10 minutes, so it is slow going. But I'm halfway through a very deep stack.  Two garbage bags of other old paperwork are now in the trash.  Yay!!

And that gets me to the "distracted sewing" part of yesterday.  I decided I would spend an hour in my sewing room while waiting for that shredder to cool off.  Do you see my mistake on the block with the green bars and yellow corners?  Yup - no seam allowance!!  I had made 5 of these Diamond Tile blocks (Bonnie Hunter) last year when she published the pattern in Quiltmaker magazine.  I was thinking this would be a great addition to the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  So I made 2 new blocks and when I was ready to square them up I just glanced at the pattern and saw 7".  But that was the finished size!  I should have trimmed them to 7.5" so there would have been a seam allowance at the tips of those yellow squares. And at the tips of the red squares in the ladybug square to the right of it. 

Now I've written in LARGE LETTERS on the pattern to Trim to 7.5" so I don't repeat that mistake. I'm going to pick out the stitches to rescue the center squares and use them again.