Life, it's not slowing down.

I think that I'm coming to grips with the fact that my life is not going to be slowing down anytime soon. I just need to manage my time better so that I can fit in all that I need & want to do. I also need to be flexible & realize that my plans for the day can get totally changed on a moments notice. For instance last Wednesday I was running some errands in town & I needed to stop by the quilt store. While dropping off a few things my friend SL said " Hey Vicky I've got a few bags of scraps in my car for you". OH MY WORD!! Her bags were large trash bags full with glorious scraps!

When I got home I purposely did not get into them until I got all of my other responsibilities done. That way I would not be interrupted in my joy.

I was having a ball & had all of the fabric out on the floor & my husband walked in & said " You must be in heaven" & I was! Oh my goodness the possibilities! I'm looking forward to seeing what can be out of this wonderful pile of scrappiness.

I'm still trying to work on my list of UFO's. My current UFO project is "Exploding Nine Patch". Last year my guild hosted Jennifer Dick of 42 Quilts as our speaker for our July program. We also had her do a workshop on her pattern "Exploding Nine Patch". Well my first idea went clearly out the window. Since we were having the workshop at the local quilt store I decided to go shopping, for yardage. Talk about awkward. I felt so awkward shopping for yardage. Anyway I decided on my focus fabric, I had my background (black) & 2 cordinating solids. I was ready or so I thought. I made a few blocks & I didn't like it at all, put all of the fabric in a bag & didn't look at it for a year. Here is what the first block looked like

Not really what I was looking for.

Well last week while in the quilt shop I saw the focus fabric & noticed that I could use 2 additional solids fabrics, one in the pink & one in the green/blue family. So here are my new blocks.

The blue blocks

The Pink block

I really like these! I've got 32 blocks cut out & ready to sew up & I figure that I should do that & figure out how I'm going to set them before I make any more.

I'm still working on my friend Liz's quilt as my L/E project. It's slow but any forward progress is good.

Starting in September I will be teaching/hosting a hand embroidery class the second Thursday of the month. Each class will be a different hand embroidery stitch. The first class is on the Stem stitch & how to transfer your pattern to the fabric & on black fabric its kind of interesting.

Octobers class will be on the Blanket Stitch & we'll be doing wool appliqué.

I have completely fallen in love with this block & am currently working on cutting out more so that I can make a much larger quilt.

It has slowed down some on the farm now that all of the hay is done! So excited about that!

 I hope that y'all are doing well & are finding some time each day to do some stitching weather by hand or machine. More later on,

Vicky