Weekend quilting

Over the past couple weekends, I've been catching up a little with my quilt projects. Above is my progress so far on my (mostly) blue and yellow quilt. I'm assembling it as I go it won't get out of control.

This is the latest block that I did for this weekend's class.

These two blocks are from Lori's class. I've got three more blocks to catch up with on that quilt. We are now at the putting it all together stage, or some of us are :)

I was also repotting my African violets and saw their bowls and pots made an interesting color combination that I might want to use for a kids' quilt design I'm working on. I've wanted to put a free pattern, or set of patterns, on my site, for charity quilts. I've been looking at the Project Linus sites in particular, working out the preferred sizes and materials. I have my drawings done, but I haven't made up my prototypes yet. I also need to figure how to make up the PDF files and put them on the site.

My experiments with color these past couple weeks expanded to my hair color as well. I'm seeing what life is like as a redhead now. I've been blond all my life, except for a brief period after birth when my hair was black, oddly. But since it fell out and the blond grew in, I've been blond. I've only been out and about a couple times since the change, but I have noticed that women I have never met before seem to feel quite comfortable walking right up to me and asking me for advice, so far on such things as calcium supplements and the age-appropriateness of certain articles of clothing. I'm wondering if I suddenly look more knowledgeable. It's a little startling, but kind of nice.

Catching up with my quilt homework

I'm only one class behind now. I even thought I'd try to get ahead. The next class is a paper-pieced block. Being convinced I couldn't match any of the seams up without drawing the whole block out to size and then cutting it apart, I started drawing, and erasing, and drawing, until the block was too complicated to be paper-pieced. This is why I am always behind. I am not happy if I don't make a thing more complicated than it has to be. My worst offense so far has been our bow tie block. Once I was done, mine had eighty individual parts that I put together to make a twelve inch square. But...it looks really nice. I'm not sorry. Lori, who has been teaching us, based her design on a quilt in Making Scrap Quilts To Use It Up. She made up the directions because it had none for that particular quilt, and simplified some of the blocks to save our collective sanity. Disregarding all potential threats to my own sanity, I got a copy on eBay and I have been happily re-complicating the blocks ever since.

Traditional quilting

Sometimes I like to just sit and sew by hand. It's relaxing and meditative. This is a hodgepodge of pieces from Lori Mann's quilt class. She volunteered to teach a group of us, and her patterns and instructions have been great. (Thanks, Lori!) I am embarrassed to say, even with the time we had off for the holidays, I am still behind!