Sunday works in progress

I'm working on yet another baby quilt. This baby will be a month old tomorrow so I'm doing better than my standard lately of new quilts for six month old babies. . . I'm hoping to finish piecing the top for this today although that may be a bit ambitious since I've done very little sewing and it's nearly noon.

I also finished two more stars for the blue/grey/orange quilt I've been working on for James so I'm one-fifth through the stars for that. (I like percentages.) I've already got my next few lined up and it's turning out SUPER cute. I'm glad that I'll still be able to see this quilt on the reg even after it's out of my hands.

And on the long term goal front, I started an applique quilt. Needle turn applique is a new technique for me so it's very slow going. This was what I did last night. I bought the pattern last year when we were in South Africa. The designer of the quilt won awards for her version. The nice thing about her pattern is that it is really free form. The pattern is very basic sorts of line drawings as starting points for the blocks. And since there is no picture of her quilt, I don't have any ideas of what fabrics/colors/textures she used so I don't have any preconceived notions of how it is "supposed" to look. Which means I have to be resourceful and I can't fall back on what I've seen before. Particularly when I don't know what I'm doing, I tend to play it safe and reference the artist's idea of what something should look like instead of making myself the artist. I'm excited. This is the first (and smallest) of 19 blocks. They get large and very detailed. I thought this tiny pumpkin was probably a good place to start. My goal is to finish this one by February 2014. Simple goal right? Two years? And then I can enter it into my local guild's quilt show. (It's every two years and no matter how hard and fast I stitch, I don't think I'll make it into the show that starts this Friday.)

Finally, I had a friend talk sense into me while I was trying to baste my quilt for Kelly. It really is too much for me to handle on my own. I just don't have the setup to quilt something that large on my own. So it's going out to be quilted this week. In all honestly, it'll save me so much stress and probably be done faster. Plus it frees me up to work on one of the 22 other quilts I still need want to make this year. Yep. Two have been added. And guess what they are??? Baby quilts, of course. Sigh. . .

xoxoxoxo