Wow! It’s been a busy week. Here’s what I’ve been working on:

1. February 12x12x12 quilt is coming along. It’s been fused, appliquéd, beaded, and basted. I’m going to try hand quilting with YLI Jean Stitch in hot pink. Here’s a sneak peek (right).

btw: I haven’t given up on the January 12x12x12 sashiko quilt. I’m not quite ready to start that one yet, and didn’t want to be perpetually behind the whole year.

2. January FFFC quilt center panel is fused (left). The red spool looks odd in the photo. My heart sunk when I noticed that, but when I checked the real thing it looked fine. It was hanging on my design “curtain” and must not have been flat against the wall.

I’m not going to appliqué the pieces down, just machine free-motion quilt over the whole thing (any suggestions for type of thread to use?). I’m also choosing the border fabrics. I really like the way this one turned out and might make another one larger with needle-turn appliqué. This one is 8 inches square. (That’s an easy size to do when I use my computer because I can print it all out on one page.)

3. CBQ miniature challenge (no I didn’t make all of these blocks in one week, but I did do some!) is made from a UFO I started in 2004. It’s Housepitality from Fons & Porter’s Love of Quilting Jan/Feb 2004 issue, except really, really small. The original house blocks are supposed to be 10 inches. I’m not sure what size mine will be (right) since they’re not finished yet. The square-in-a-square blocks you see there will finish at 1/2 inch.

4. Hand quilting practice almost every day. I’m working on making the stitches even. They’re generally about 10 stitches to the inch.

5. Bling Bling scarf is up to 27 inches long. I’ve finished one ball of yarn and am hesitant to start the new one (it’s a different dye lot and looks really different) for fear it won’t look right. Maybe I’ll go back to the store with the scarf and see if there’s some that looks more like my scarf than the one I have.

6. Studio cleaning because with this many projects going on you can’t work in a messy place!

7. New blogger is adding line breaks when I upload photos and in general is misbehaving, making this post take entirely way too long. At least there were no problems to fix when my blog migrated. I like that I can add labels.

happy quilting!