Goodies in the mail!

I came home from work this afternoon to find a package in my mailbox all the way from Australia!  It was the Faerie Pack from Fiona at Finding Fifth, which I won for my January block from the And Sew On block of the month at Quiet Play.  Sew fun!  Thank you, Fiona and Kristy!

Using my seam ripper!

I finished the February block for the And Sew On block of the month hosted by Kristy at Quiet Play. It was trickier for me than I expected, and I ended up making the block twice!  I still don't have some of the seams lined up quite as nicely as I would like them to be, but overall I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Here is the January block:

After seeing so many fun versions of the Scrappy Trip Around the World pattern, I decided I wanted to make one.  I'm excited about trying to make it completely out of my stash!  I don't know how many blocks that will be, but I'm going to keep going until I run out of 2.5 by 16 inch strips!  A question I have for anyone out there - is there a way to determine which fabric will come out in the center of your finished block when you are initially laying out the strips?

I have only made 2 blocks so far, but one thing I love about this pattern is taking any 6 pieces of fabric out of my stash and being able to make a block in an hour.  It will be fun to see how the quilt develops as I add more blocks.  I think I need more fun, bright colors, or maybe larger scale prints.  What do you think?

Linking up to Quiet Play's And Sew On Block of the Month!  Can't wait to see February's block!

No quilting in my life this week!  But I did enjoy a quick long weekend jaunt to Las Vegas.  Otherwise my time has been completely taken up by these lovely people!

Beautiful Scarves

My quilt group met this past week and did a fun project together.  Based on the article, "Tie Transfer Dyeing," by Kathy Barinholtz from the October/November 2010 issue of Quilting Arts Magazine, we created beautiful silk scarves for ourselves from men's silk ties that we collected from thrift shops.  It was a quick and fascinating project to do together, and so fun to see how each scarf turned out differently.  I am so new at blogging that I can't figure out how to add a caption to each photo separately, but the pictures show the steps we went through to make our scarves.  The most interesting thing to each of us was how the various ties we used gave our scarves completely different color designs than we had imagined we would get!  I am linking up to Really Random Thursday ( or Friday!) at Live a Colorful Life.

                                    

Little Penguins Quilt