As a person who does some quilting almost daily, being away from my stash for two months is a challenge. Obviously I needed to plan ahead for my snowbird vacation, and take work with me. This year I decided to work on some things that have been on the back burner for a while, as well as working on the pieces I started at QuiltCon.

I posted soon after I got here, excited about my curved piecing. I had decided I needed to work on drunkard’s path blocks to improve my curved piecing skills. I have a ton of 5″ charm square blocks.. they are so cute, and so beautifully packaged that I am instantly drawn to them. And they are the perfect size for the drunkard path block. I initially worked with all the greens I could find as I sorted through my stash, and combined them with Kona Snow.  Not enough blocks to make a quilt yet… I have a total of 185 blocks. I am thinking of making it 77 x 84″, which means I have made 35% of the total number I need. Not bad!

I enjoyed making these blocks so much that I selected more charm square blocks, and combined them with Kona Silver. I am only using one of the two blocks this pattern makes here (love circles right now!), so I will have lots of leftovers for another project, another day. So far I have only made 70 of these. Right now I am thinking of using them to make placemats and a table runner… we’ll see.

Before I left for Georgia, I spent a wonderful day with Shirley and Jane preparing fabric to make a one block wonder quilt. Can’t wait to see what their quilts turn out like! I love making this quilt as I don’t have to think about the fabric at all after I have made my initial selection, and I have made a number of these quilts already. After carefully setting up your fabric, just cut and sew, and watch with wonder how the blocks turn out. I found enough fabric in my stash to make 6 more of these quilts.. sigh! I pieced this while away, and photographed it hanging from a branch of a magnolia tree in our side yard.. lots of Spanish moss in the garden!

I made no progress at all on my version of the spiderweb quilt, posted about here. Mainly because I did tons of paper piecing to finish my blocks from Amy Friend’s Crazy Eights class I took at QuiltCon. I pieced these blocks into sets of 4, and decided to remove the paper at this point, as I know how hard it will be to work on a huge piece using forceps to get those tiny bits of leftover paper out. I will use tons of Best Press to stop the bias edges from stretching as I piece these blocks together. I made the blocks slightly smaller than the pattern called for so that the pattern would fit on standard letter sized paper. There are now 16 blocks, so this will make a 58 x 58″ quilt when completed. Making these blocks was fun, but removing the paper much less fun. Fingers crossed that I can get that all done without undoing any seams!

I belong to a small sewing group that meets once a month, and we do a gift exchange at Christmas. In 2015 I got a Lil Twister template. It involves sewing charm square blocks together, and then using the template to create new blocks. I have wanted to give it a try for a while, so I used a charm square pack and sewed a 40 x 40″ top. I found it easy to mess up the piecing together of these blocks, and ended up having to trash some of them. The final piece is pretty small: 21″ X 21″. It looks muddy to me, obviously I chose the wrong fabrics: solids or tiny designs would work best. Not sure what this will end up as, but I am glad I tried this template at last.

I made no progress on Heather Jones’ West Chester quilt or Violet Craft’s Bunny blocks (both mentioned in my last post). BUT there is one more project I have been working on.. my son and his wife are expecting a baby in 6 weeks (yeah!!), and are waiting to see whether it is a boy or girl.  I decided on this pale green colour, and here is my sweater so far. The pattern is from a book by Sublime, and I am making it in a machine washable acrylic. Size one, so I have a lot of time to get it done.

Photos from my retreat from winter… Saint Simon’s Island, Georgia.