A Slow Week

 Hi all -

It looks like fall is truly here as the weather has cooled down. I had a bit of a slow week this week. The mojo just wasn't there. But I do have a few accomplishments to share.

A week and a half ago the Colorado Quilt Council had their annual quilt show called Quilt-A-Fair. It's a bit of a strange show since the floor is filled with vendors and the quilts are hung in the rafters. So it's a bit hard to see the quilts. I actually went to the show for about 10 years before I realized it was a show and not a vendor event! Anyway, I went again this year and bought more than I had planned or needed! At one of the booths, I picked up a couple of precut applique kits from The Whole Country Caboodle. This company has applique kits for a bunch of different dog breeds. I picked up a kit for each of my sisters to represent their dogs. This week I prepared the appliques for each kit.

German Shepard

Dachshund

I still need to pick background fabrics and put everything together, but this was a start. I'll probably try to get these finished by Christmas, but it's okay if they don't get done until later.

We also had our monthly English Paper Piecing (EPP) meeting last Friday. I use that time to work on my La Passacaglia quilt designed by Willyne Hammerstein. This month I finished basting the pieces for the last part of my first rosette and started sewing the pieces together into units.

La Passacaglia

The units I'm working on are the purple star units on the right in the picture. In the quilt, this round of the rosette is partially obscured by other rosettes so there are only six of the double-star units in this round. I accidentally prepared enough of the purple triangle units to make a full round of the units, but that's okay since there are a lot of other star rounds in other rosettes so I can use those extra units in another rosette. This is the final round of this rosette so I'm excited to get this finished and move on to the next rosette!

Finally, our quilt guild has asked us to make a bunch of 16-patch units to be used in Quilts of Valor (QOV) quilts.  They want us to use red, white and blue as well as gold, gray, tan and cream for the blocks and they want the blocks to be scrappy. They want blocks made out of 1.5" squares and blocks made out of 2.5" squares. So I spent some time this weekend going through my scraps and cutting squares to use for the blocks. When I needed a break from cutting, I put together a few blocks.

QOV Blocks - 2.5" Squares

It was fun to use up some of the scraps! They are collecting blocks through the end of the year so I'll keep adding squares to the pile and making new blocks. They plan to use the blocks as centers of churn dask and star blocks. 

Nancy