dontcallmebetsy.com

Social media really seems to hamper my penchant for blogging, because of the super easy way I can just toss a photo up and a pithy little caption and call it a day. I made a gorgeous new quilt using Denyse Schmidt's Washington Depot collection, and there's a super simple tutorial coming for it super soon. It's a simple tessellated plus quilt in reds and purples, but I'm having fun with it...in between stressing about moving and dealing with a screaming almost two year old (she's warming up for the terrible twos in the worst way).These next few weeks leading up to our move are going to be crazy, but I sure am going to try to be more involved with my blog!

As I carried the two halves that I have going so far for my epic Anna Maria Horner patchwork quilt up the stairs to my bedroom to take some progress photos yesterday afternoon, I realized that apparently I only make warm/cool quilts of my bed. My other bed quilt, made some eons ago, is a warm/cool HST quilt , and this new quilt is a simple charm quilt set on point and sorted into warms and cools. I had myself a good chuckle over it for a few minutes before setting about to laying out my work so far on the sheet to see how things were looking, now that my progress doesn't fit on my design wall. That's the thing about making big quilts for me - it's hard to really get a good sense of how they're looking in my sewing room right now with the way things are laid out.

I've finished off the Pink Sunshine quilt, and it's officially been delivered to the munchkin's math teacher, This super happy, mega scrappy quilt was a lot of fun to work on, using scraps of Lorelei's baby quilt and other various pink fabrics floating around my sewing room. I used Aurifil 3660 , a fun variegated pink, to go with all the different shades of pink used in the quilt, and also shockingly because it's the only spool of pink Aurifil I own! I think the next quilt I want to get back to is my Anna Maria Horner quilt for my bed or the Lizzy House book quilt that I think is also destined for my bed, or maybe the living room.

But that's not to say that we can't make little tweaks or twists on tradition that sometimes make something fresh appear - and when I filmed last fall for the new PBS show, that's one of the things I did. I love trying to put blocks together, mashing up two different classic blocks that I love, and two blocks that I love very much are the classic Carpenter's Star and the Patchwork Wheel, or Cheyenne, block. I fooled around over and over again with the components of these two blocks, and came up with a mashup that I presented on last week's new episode of, which if you're an MQG member you can watch online for free anytime on the MQG Community site. The pattern features tips and tricks on making eight half-square triangles at once, as well as loads of full-color illustrations to walk you through making the quilt block.