BOM, PHXMQG and Paper Piecing Make for a GREAT Day!

 Kathy and I started off our day by heading north to 35th Ave. for the BOM and black bag day.  This is the block for this month...ours is of course in black and we have to make four blocks each.  This block looks MUCH easier to do than last month's!  Kathy cut the fabric last night and we plan to sew them today.  We met up with Ros (briefly) at the store and with BJ and Jacki who also joined us for  lunch in Chandler before Kathy dropped me at the PHXMQG meeting.  BJ surprised us with a starfruit pincushion--each!  I owe you BJ!  So thoughtful of her to make extra while she was doing her swap pincushion!

At the meeting, Jill and I traded mug rugs (she was unable to trade a few months ago but wanted to participate) so she got a granny square one, and I LOVE my new hexie flower mug rug.  She used a rainbow variegated thread on the edges and it really is so pretty.   It is so funny, I have wanted to make mug rugs for forever, and now that I did and traded with several people I now have four different ones!

 At the meeting, I participated in the Emerald Challenge.  I was so tickled to hear I was not the only one frantically working on a challenge piece (or the pincushion) literally at the eleventh hour!  There just aren't enough sewing hours in the day.  Here are the participants with their items and a close up of the items too.

Lora with her thread catcher, Nancy with her pincushion, Me with my pillow, Tracy (Kirstin's mom, lol) with her pincushion, Becca with her pillow, Christi with her wallet and Jen with a quilt!

So many shades of emerald.  Way to represent girls!

 Now I just need to finish the Spoolin Around quilt this pillow goes with!

These are the pincushions we received in the trade (not the ones we made).  Nancy, BJ, Christi, me, Barb, Bonnie--she got mine, Ann Becca, Lora and Tracy (Kirstin's mom, lol!).  

 This is the one I got from Becca!  It is heavy and each side has a different fabric on it.  It has lots of personality!

Our program yesterday was learning Paper Piecing.  My friend Allisa (who also just replaced our treasurer) taught the workshop.  She did a great job and spent time with each of us individually (some of us more than others, lol it was my first time really!) helping us catch on.

 I have done this at least once before but I remember giving up because I kept putting the fabric on backwards.  We had six new people at our meeting and I was lucky enough to be sitting across from Sarah (one of them) and she had the seam ripper that I forgot and spent some of her time helping me (as did Jacki behind me!) until it finally started to make sense!  Sarah is also a Bonnie Hunter fan--I knew I liked that girl the minute she said hi!  She and I kept repeating a phrase about lining the seam allowance up where you want the fabric to go--which I now can't recall, but it helped alot!  You can see from the picture that I caught on and was tickled to death.  However, I didn't have a color coding of the bottle and it wasn't until I was COMPLETELY finished that I realized I was supposed to have white on the triangle parts at the top of the bottle.  I do believe I will rip it apart and fix it later on but Alissa (and Sarah and Jacki) taught me well because I came home and did more!

 Bonnie's newest Quiltmaker block is Wild and Goosey and I figured I would just do one tiny corner of the block (it takes awhile!) but I couldn't stop there...

 By the end of the night I had completed the block..posted it on facebook and had fallen in love with paper piecing and the block!

 While admiring it I suddenly realized one of my geese was flying the wrong direction!  So don't ask me how I was able to sleep last night without fixing it, but I did and this morning after helping out a friend with some ASL Linguistics homework I got the geese flying in the right direction!

So once again I have started another Bonnie Hunter project!  I am seriously her number one fan!  I am guessing this counts at my NewFo for April!

Baby Quilts, Mug Rugs, and OTR, OH MY!

 Jill (from PHXMQG) and I are doing a little side mug rug trade...she let me pick which I preferred and it was tough, but I went with pink since the one I traded with Jacki has purple in it!  I finished up the one from Jacki (she did the paper piecing and I finished the mug rug...I had some of that background purple so I bound it in that!).  This is a sign for I love you for anyone who isn't sure what it means!

 Stopped at Barbs and picked up my baby quilts.  These cowboy quilts have a loopy lasso type quilting on them, really love it!  Here you see the front of one and the back of Sam and Tiff's soon to be born little guy.

 And here is the front of that one and the back of the other one.

 It was fun to use up a bunch of that bandanna fabric and actual bandannas that I have been saving for just such a quilt!  I used leftover bits of it all to bind them.  Here is Colton's (the name Sam and Tiff have decided on this week, lol).

 And this one goes to the cabinet for another little guy, not yet known!

 Kathy finished putting the borders on our Old Tobacco Road too!  We stopped at SAS and found the perfect border for it...looks like ginko leaves and has a few shades of brown.  This quilt is huge and we aren't sure where it will wind up yet, either.

Off to Barb's for a bit.  I tried free motion quilting last night on the Brother with NO luck whatsoever.  I am not sure I had the machine set right and I sure need practice anyways.  Not really sure I am going to get my Skillbuilder BOM's done...and pretty sure this is the only month I am even going to attempt this--lol, quilting by check is my preferred way to go!  Barb is going to let me try her machine, then if I stink at it, we will know it is me and not the machine!  Cross your fingers I can manage something--PHXMQG meets next weekend already!

A Little of this and a Little of that...

Ros helped me pick out which blues will wind up in a small version of Merry Mayhem's Modern Mystery.  Can't wait to find time to cut and start this one!

 I trimmed up and added a border to the mug rug Jacki made me.  Found a backing...soon will quilt it.  Already someone on fb offered to buy it off me.  LOL, I referred her to Jacki!

 Kathy made progress on the borders tonight!  This looks SO awesome now!  She still plans to add another 5 inch border to the outside.  This quilt is huge too!

I made two QOV scrappy trips blocks for Alycia's collection.  I will try to make a few a more before I mail them off!  The night is no longer young, so off to bed I go!  More tomorrow!

Mug Rugs All Around

I spent the majority of my day in the quilting studio on Skype with Barb.  I also watched Bonnie on QuiltCam.  I did lots of little things like organizing my batting leftovers, cut batting for Suli's baby quilt and for my Skillbuilder BOM blocks, I think I made a fourth mug rug (or was that last night? lol), wound all my bobbins, and I made binding and attached it to all four of my mug rugs.  This was the first victim.  Not too bad from a galloping horse as they say, but I wasn't happy with it in more ways than one---I decided to rip it all out and attach it by machine on the front and hand bind the backs of all of them.  So here is the first one..

 and redone...much improved.

 I did do my biking, and then continued hand sewing along while watching Once Upon a Time and Downton Abbey.  This one is my favorite (below) and I am keeping it!

 Here is number three.

 And number four.

 Here they all are together.  One will be for my daughter, one for me, one for the PHXMQG swap and one for a personal swap with new quilting friend.

I hope they like them half as much as I do!  So very glad I FINALLY made some mug rugs.  It has been on my list for a very long time :)

Working on Mug Rugs :)

I spent some time last night looking over mug rug tutorials and pictures for inspiration on what to do for the Phoenix Modern Quilt Guild's Mug Rug Swap for February.  I decided on a rather simple one, but a block I had never made and I used my Denyse Schmidt fabric so hopefully someone else will love hers as much as I do.  I am making three..one for my swap partner, one for me and one for Jennifer who wanted to swap but didn't want to worry about a binded border.  So when it is all said and done, I will have three different mug rugs!

 
 

So the tops are done and the backings are made and I will leave the quilting and binding for another day.  These granny squares just make me smile.  I could almost do an entire quilt like this!

Here is Kathy holding up Old Tobacco Road.  She has about half of it together now.  This has truly been a tag team quilt and fun to do!

I hate to see my long weekend come to an end...back to work tomorrow.  I did pretty good getting  back on my be active and eat right train.  I rode my bike all but two nights this week (groin isn't ready for everyday!) and tonight I did some hand weights too.  I am writing my food down on myfitnesspal and am once again trying hard to make a life change that really needs to happen.  Life is good here too!