12 in '12

I am posting this a little early this month cuz I am soon heading up to MoKan.
Just one finish this month but I really love it. The row & round robin was the first group thing that HMQG did. This quilt has the talent & love of quite a few of my guild buddies & it means so much to me. I am glad it is now a quilt.

Playing with my food

More specifically, playing with cake -- layer cake that is.

I'm trying to limit my purchases of pre-cuts, trying to limit my purchases of fabric period. (A glance at recent blog posts clearly show that I have not been successful.) Somehow I have quite a stack of layer cakes (& jelly rolls & fat quarters...) in my fabric stash now. I've been pretty good about finishing existing projects, not beginning new ones, but I really wanted to use a couple of these cakes & start something new. Currently, I have been obsessed with triangles. I wanted to begin a project that had lots of mindless sewing & that would be fun playtime when it came to laying out the pieces. My go-to, easy-peasy block these days is the half-square triangle so I decided to employ a couple of my recent pre-cut acquisitions. I cut up the entire stack of the Malka Dubrawsky's Stitched in Color layer cake that I won at our recent HMQG retreat, found a single fabric to use as the opposite side of the HST & now I have a stack of squares to assemble before I get to the fun part of laying out this one.



I took a 2nd layer cake -- Quilt Blocks by Ellen Luckett Baker -- & cut them -- not into HSTs but into HRTs -- that is, half-rectangle triangles. I dug out several solids that coordinate plus gray & white for the rest of the rectangle. This is something I've never tried before so please wish me luck!

Retreat & More

It has been a week since I returned from the HMQG Quilt Retreat. I -- and I think everyone else -- had a wonderful, productive time. Time away from our daily lives & the ability to do NOTHING but sew was exactly what many of us needed. The meals were great, the company was great, the only problem was it was just a day (or 2) too brief. Nearly everyone finished -- or made major progress -- on at least one project. Some had 4 or 5 tops finished by the time we left Deepwoods Retreat on Sunday. (If you want to learn how to make efficient use of your time, ask a busy Mom!)









I took with me the fixin's for about 11 different projects. I had decided that my first priority was the yellow zigzag top -- it was built on the diagonal & had outgrown my design door. As I was laying out the rows I was thinking I might use some of the remaining blocks on the back. But as I came to my last rows I ran out of blocks! I was short by 2!! I would have been panicked but I knew that I had some leftover fabric at home. I joined in on the jelly roll race & came in dead last. (Woo Hoo!) I had planned to work on my Swoon blocks -- I had all the parts for 8 additional blocks cut & ready to put on the assembly line, but I had mis-cut one element for all of them. And -- of course -- it was too small rather than too big. So I moved on to another project. I came home with 2 finished (well, nearly finished) tops, great memories & a desire to go back SOON!



I also came home with more fabric than I left with. There were awesome gift bags for everyone! (Thanks Fat Quarter Shop & Pink Chalk Fabrics!) I got 2 "cutie packs" -- 2.5 inch squares -- of Circa 1934 (I think these will be cute used with linen, maybe raw-edge appliqued) & a layer cake of Malka Dubrawsky's Stitched in Color!!!! I can't wait to begin something with that!





When I got home, I was still in that GO mode. I built a daisy cottage for an internet friend



& (finally!) worked on my blocks for the QuiltCon Block Challenge. After I got my stack of fabrics in the required colors, I was sitting at my sewing machine & noticed how they matched the little Avon mug I have sitting in my window. So that became one of my blocks. (I think it is pretty darn cute.)





Happy Mother's Day!!!

Advancing to Retreat!