Secret Sister and Christmas Cracker Gifts

I received such a fantastic assortment of items from my Secret Sister at WWCQ and from the Christmas Crackers on CQI. Thanks so much ladies!

Christmas Tree Skirt

Over at WWCQ, we are going to have a year long RR with wedges for a Christmas Tree Skirt. These are big wedges; 24" in length and 18.5" at the largest width. So, as you can imagine, each of the wedges will probably take a bit longer to embellish than your average RR block.

Here are the wedges that I made:

I pieced these using the same technique as I did for the purple blocks that I posted about, Martha Green's method. I really do find that this is a great way to make a dent in my cotton fabric scrap bin; these wedges are entirely out of scrap fabric! What's really funny about the process is that I made so many units, that I probably have enough for two more tree skirts...lol!

Stitching on Gerry's Retreat Block

Late September, I attended a crazy quilting retreat with some ladies from CQI. One of the things that we did leading up to the retreat was a round robin with fabric selected by the challenge leader. Boy was this fabric a challenge!

Gerry's block showed up to the retreat a little bare, so some of us volunteered to take it home and give it some more stitching.  Here is what the block looks like now.

I added the fan at the bottom and did some stitching on a couple of the seams. I also added the spray of ribbon flowers at the top...which, now that I look at it, it looks like there really should be one more. I did send Sharon one extra, but it didn't have leaves. =( I also did some stitching on the center, adding pizzazz to the motif that was printed on the challenge fabric.

I hope she likes it!

A Festival of Flowers

I was looking for something different to do while sitting in front of the TV and discoverd that I really like to make flowers. I've found that the Clover templates are really great, especially the medium round yo-yos and the small kanzashi templates. I also ran across something called the Hana Ami flower loom; this makes really cool looking flowers as well.

Here is a picture of my latest flower creations. There are kanzashi flowers (the ones with the petals), hana ami flowers (made out of yarn), yo-yo's, rolled fabric strip flowers, folded ribbon flowers, and twisted fabric strip flowers.

I've also started an Etsy shop: http://www.etsy.com/shop/Bananers2 There isn't much in there yet, but we all have to start somewhere!

Martha Green Piecing

At the crazy quilting retreat in Estes Park, we had a teacher, Martha Green, give us lessons. One of the things that she taught us was her piecing method. I was pretty intrigued, so I decided to give it a try with a bag of fabric scraps that I had lying around.

The first picture is my "mess" in progress, followed by the blocks that I have already pieced.