Where did all the grey come from?

I wondered if I had enough light and medium neutral scraps to make a throw with my three sunflower blocks.  You should have seen the look on my daughter's face.  She looked at my stash shelf, then looked at me and laughed.

She was right.  I had plenty.  In my defense, I wasn't sure how much variety I had in that bin.  Still, as you see, I made it work.  The grey bin now contains a reduced variety of fabrics, and is comfortably full rather than bursting at the seams, but there are still plenty of grey bits and pieces to pull for some other project.

Where did all that grey come from??!!  I'm a brights gal!  This quilt has to be the most neutral, low-volume quilt I've ever made, and even that had those pops of yellow to brighten it up. I just had a look through my quilt pictures to see if I could figure it out. 

Since 2001, I have finished 74 quilts plus assorted table runners and place mats. Four of those quilts have grey backing.  Trimming the backing after quilting yields a lot of scraps, so I'm not surprised to find those fabrics in my sunflower quilt.  Still, there is a lot more variety than that in the quilt!

I didn't use any grey at all in any quilt until 2014 when a some grey block corners made an appearance in my son's Kaleidoscope quilt (finish #34). Eclipse Sky (#47) and Fundy Skies (#42) in 2016 were yellow/grey quilts, but there were only 3 different greys between them, and I only scraps had of two of the three.

Eclipse Sky

Fundy Skies

My daughter's bed quilt has a scrappy neutral background, including light greys and grey on white prints, though the greens and oranges certainly dominate it.  I used up the last of those scraps in this quilt.

Altogether I could only identify 14 projects that used any grey, in the top or the backing or both.  Scraps from three of those were too dark for this background, so didn't contribute.  There were four 1/4 yard cuts in the bin that I had bought for something yet never used, so that accounts for a little bit more of the variety. 

All this to say, I think scraps multiply.  How else did I get a whole quilt background from scraps from so few projects?

Don't worry.  I won't list all the quilts the yellows came from.  I honestly don't think I could!  I had expected my yellow stash to lack variety too...

I'm off to add prairie points accents to my sunflower quilt!  Thanks goodness for the yellow stash to brighten up the grey stash!

Sunflower blocks are from the pattern Soaking Up the Sun from the book Mini Wonderful Curves from Sew Kind of Wonderful.