Winding Ways

Remember all those pictures of the blocks in progress??

Well, despite all the distractions that attempted to derail this, I've pieced the top!  Now it's time to add it to the flimsy pile.... :)

And how are the distractions doing??

Here is the stitchery.  I'm almost done, just need to finish the border.  Then I need to decide what to do with it.  Any suggestions?

And the pile of knitted squares???

Well, it's slowly turning into a blanket.  I'm on the fifth row.  It'll take a while (it's made out of sock yarn)

Nearly Insane

I've also had this minor little distraction going on this last little while...

This is the Nearly Insane quilt...  I've got roughly 22 block left, but just couldn't resist a little preview....



March Finishes

I have a finish for the month.  (Though surprisingly (or not) not winding ways) 

This is Some Swell Swell.

This is made using the swell charm pack 'Swell'. 
It actually one of the quilts from my 2010 UFO list.  Yeah!!  One down and ten more to go.

Ornament Exchange

I was going to take down the ornaments (since it seems the world is now preparing for Easter) and realized that I hadn't actually posted about them. I found this ornament stand at Ikea and thought it'd be a great way to highlight the new ornaments each year.

You'll likely recognize the gingerbread man from the SSCS swap.

The other ornaments are from the annual ornament exchange. I've been exchanging ornaments with the same wonderful people scattered around the world since 1994. (Yup, we're now all blessed with wonderful, unique, handmade decorations for our trees)

I really love looking at them. Hmmm. How bad do you think it'd be to keep them up all year?

In City Retreat

Last weekend my guild had an in-city retreat. One of our members found a wonderful room with lots of great natural light, lots of room, huge tables, and comfy chairs. It was amazing.

We did get a little overwhelmed with our projects. (Not sure if you can see it in the picture below, but under the white pile, you can see shoes.) Good news is, we only lost one! :)

Several months ago (like last year), we did a charm pack night. We had a show & tell of all sorts of quilts made from charm packs. That night inspired a second night. We each picked a charm pack and created these split 9-patch quilts from them. (If anyone is interested, let me know and I'll create a tutorial for them). I love seeing the exact same pattern turn out so differently just because of the fabric choices.

Speaking of things turning out differently, just because of fabric choices... Do you remember these quilts? One and Two. Well, here are two more of our guild BOMs.

Building blocks

I made these blocks for my nephew for Christmas.

I made each block a single colour and then added different pictures on each side for each block.

You can nest them together so you can have fun with "in the box, out of the box, in the box, out..."

And, of course, stack them up (and knock them over!)

I found the tutorial for the blocks here. It's a great tutorial. Wonderful explanations and photos. Very easy to follow.

Distractions

Apparently I was doing too well with focus... I found a few distractions....

I did pretty good with Winding ways and got the blocks all the way to the final step.

But then I found this cool knitted blanket pattern and I started knitting squares...

But then I took an embroidery class with a friend so we could learn how to do all those amazing embroidery projects that we keep seeing out there. This is the class project so far...

Apparently it is time to start focusing again. :)