The value of graph paper

I said yesterday that I was going to cut into my Flea Market Fancy fabric last night. Instead, I ended up going to my LQS holiday open house. Then I came home and started plotting the best way to use FMF fabric. My big question is: how has this fabric come to have such an iconic status? Sure, the colors are great. Sure, the designs are wonderful. But great and wonderful fabric hits the shelves on a weekly basis. So it's just puzzling to me. But I would love to know why personally I am willing to spend way over market value for a fat quarter!  And why can I give away literally yards of fabric that I know I won't use, and then freak out feel a bit apprehensive when I see this little scrap on the floor that could inadvertently be thrown away? Is therapy in order? (And please don't suggest fabric therapy as I think we all know what that means...)

When I was clearing out my sewing room, I went through stacks of old quilting books. I quickly thumbed through them, and then most of them went into the donation pile. There were a couple of patterns that looked interesting enough to make a copy for future reference. One of them was this one, based on an old vintage quilt. The designer called it "Mama's pop beads." Anyone old enough to remember pop beads?

While the fabrics in this quilt did nothing to draw me in, I really was intrigued by the design. With a few change-ups. In the original quilt, all the "beads" were small-scale blue prints in the same value, and the connectors were different colors. My original thought was to also strip piece the beads. Each bead would be the same color family of FMF, but it would have a good variety of fabric in the bead, probably including some that were not part of the FMF fancy line.

But then I got out my graph paper and colored pencils so I could check color placement. And that's when I had a much better idea of making each bead out of one single FMF fabric, and all the connectors will be a brown fabric from the FMF line, all against a background of Kona snow. Much less sewing, it will show off the fabric, and it will have the clean and modern look that I'm going for.

So what do you all think? Is it time to make the first cut?