Giveaway

Judi over at Green Fairy Quilts is having a great giveaway...a layer cake, jelly roll and pattern.  Hop on over and check it out!

Christmas Block of the Month - "Love"

My latest hand project is a block of the month from Gail Pan Designs. Gail is offering this series free at her website.

I had not done much embroidery in years and this was a challenge for me. I love it! It was so relaxing and satisfying for me to stitch away and watch the block unfold.

I am behind as it is already March and I haven't finished February yet, but that is okay. I am allowing myself some freedom with this and not holding to a fast schedule. I can't wait to see how the finished project will look.

2009 New Years Day Mystery Quilt

A week or so before the New Year began, I was going through my favorite blogs and came across the 2009 New Year's Day Mystery Quilt. Well, Brian had bought me a new sewing machine for Christmas and this seemed like a great project to start with.

The project is suppose to be completed in a day. You get a few preliminary instructions on fabric choices and cutting instructions. Throughout New Year's Day, more instructions were added for building the blocks, more cutting and eventually the final assembly.

I knew there was no way I could pull this off in a day, so I set the month of January to try and complete the top. I finished today! It is hard for me to carve out time to work on projects like this, but I set my machine up in our family room on a small table. This allowed me to snatch bits and pieces of time, often just 5 or 10 minutes. Little by little the pieces took shape. I would encourage anyone who doesn't think they have time in their busy schedules to give it a try. Keep your project handy and sit when you can, even if it doesn't seem for very long. Those minutes add up to a finished project.

I did not peak and see what the final project looked like until I was almost ready to assemble to larger pieces. This was a real challenge for me as I am a visual learning and not being able to see the finished project was tough, but helped me to work with the instructions and not try and get ahead of myself.

I do not have a large stash of fabric, so the first step for me was a trip to the fabric store. I don't have a lot of confidence yet in my ability to pick good colors especially when it comes to variations in hues and tones, so I went with the suggestions on the pattern. This is the stack of fabric I brought home. The photo doesn't show it real well, but the colors are golden, yellow, two greens, black and red.

Lots of cutting produced these nice piles of squares and rectangles. I love my rotary cutter and this does not take nearly as long as it looks like it might.

The first sewing steps resulted in these snowball blocks.

The next step proved to be the bane of my experience in this quilt...flying geese. By the end of the project, I was referring to them as drunken geese as they refused to fly very straight. I did a lot of "unsewing"...aka ripping out while trying to get them together. I can not say that I love flying geese, although they do look so nice then they are done correctly.

These are the final components that made up the quilt. The block on the right was the center double stair block.

So, without further ado...here is my 2009 New Year's Day Mystery Quilt top, a center medallion quilt. It is about 30" square. I will finish it into a wallhanging.

For my first machine-pieced quilt, I am quite pleased with how it came out. I had to look up several things and learned some new techniques for making it go quicker. It was a challenge to keep good 1/4 inch seams and I often got way off the mark...thus the unsewing. I was able to let go of some of my perfectionist tendencies and allow for mistakes here and there. I have some points cut off and not all my corners meet squarely, but it is completed and I love it. I don't suppose anyone will notice much except myself or perhaps other quilters and I'm sure any that see it will bestow a certain amount of quilting grace.