Second Scarfscape Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well and had a wonderful Halloween! We continue to have warmer than usual weather and haven't had a real snow yet. We did have a dusting on Monday morning, but nothing measurable yet. Maybe this week will be the week! The NWS is forecasting 1/4" this Monday night, so that would be a start. Of course, I also want the snow to work with my schedule. 😀 I've been invited to join a group of ladies who get together at the local Bernina shop for two days of quilting every other month and my first chance to join them is Tuesday/Wednesday this week. I'm really looking forward to this! Although I love my guilds, it'll be nice to have a regular get-together with lovely ladies that is independent of the guilds!

This week I was excited to finish my second Scarfscape scarf designed by Laura Nelkin.  This is a lovely scarf knit with a camel/silk blend color-changing yarn.

Second Scarfscape

This one has a different lace border pattern than the first one I made.

Second Scarfscape - Lace Pattern

I really like that Laura added the second lace border to the pattern! This is a really fun pattern to knit. The camel/silk blend yarn is just so soft and scrumptious in my hands. And I love watching the yarn colors change and adding the sparkly beads (three different bead colors are used). I have three more kits for this scarf. I started the second on this week.

Third Scarfscape

Third Scarfscape - Beaded Ribbing

I gave my first Scarfscape to a friend and will give one of my new ones to each of my two my sisters.  Then, the last two will be for me. I think this scarf will be fun to wear because it is long so can be wrapped around your neck a couple of times, if desired, and has the beaded ends and bottom border to help keep the scarf in place.

This week I spent a lot of time cutting fabric. I have a kit for Bubble Plus, designed by Sew Scatterbrained, that I was going to take to my previous retreat, but decided not to take it because of the complicated cutting that was needed. This quilt has a lot of circular cuts. It dawned on me that I might be able to cut the pieces using my Brother Scan-n-Cut. That would give me perfect pieces easily. However, I've found that the most difficult part about the scan-n-cut is finding a mat that will hold the medium being cut in place without being too tacking to get the cut pieces off of the mat. This ended up being the problem for these pieces. I've found that I can cut fabric with a fusible backing for fusible applique using the fabric mat, but I tried this with the fabric alone and it wasn't sticky enough. So I ended up cutting all of the fabric by hand. I was, however, able to cut the templates that I used to cut the fabric with the scan-n-cut so at least my templates were perfect. Here are all of the pieces I cut:

Bubble Plus - Pieces Cut For Blocks

I was able to cut all of the pieces needed for the quilt blocks. I'll cut the borders and binding after the center of the quilt is assembles. This is a picture of the quilt (I couldn't find the pattern online):

Bubble Plus

I'll put this aside to work on at a retreat.

I also finished cutting the pieces for the blocks of my Heartfelt quilt designed by Krystal Jackelwicz.

Heartfelt - The Rest of the Cutting

There are a lot of small pieces used in this quilt! I was very tired of cutting when I got done with this! After finishing the cutting, I decided that it would be easier to finish piecing these small, fiddly pieces at home rather than taking them to a retreat, so I sewed more of the blocks together.

Heartfelt - Finished Blocks

I have a lot more blocks to piece, but I really love how this looks so far! 

Finally, we had our monthly cross-stitch group meeting this week so I also made progress on my Flying Beauties cross-stitch kit. 

Flying Beauties

The lower left side of the project is finished. I like to do the backstitch around the images as soon as I can rather than waiting until I've finished all of the cross-stitch because I find the backstitching tedious and it always takes a lot longer at the end that I expect. I'm getting close to finishing this project! I've started the last butterfly, then there are two dragonflies and some ferns and I will be done!

Nancy