Busy As A Bee

With little time to blog. (I spend way too much time on Facebook...feel free to connect with me there: susanentwistle--there's a link on my sidebar), I have accomplished a couple of things since we last connected.

First off, those cool spool blocks from my last post...the Aurifil Designer of the Month 2014 blocks, were selected as the January prize winner for the quilt-a-long being run by Pat Sloan for Aurifil.

And what did I win, you ask?

 Yeah, baby! A box of thready goodness....12 large spools of 50wt Aurifil cotton. Best-thread-ever!

I had a chance to take a class with the mother of the modern quilt guild....Victoria Findlay Wolfe. We exercised our creativity and created 'made fabric'.

Which I then proceeded to hack up and make into something else

 

And then I got tired of that (paper piecing for the 'something else' wasn't my best idea). So I went out and picked up some holiday novelty fabric and created some fresh 'made' fabric (that Tucker seemed to enjoy a lot)

 

Slapped borders on them and stitched them into a table quilt for the coffee table

which is just waiting to be sandwiched, pinned and quilted (anyone have any free time? :-) ).

But right now, I've grown bored with 'made fabric' and the Drunken Irishman coffee table project so I moved on to play with a new toy...

my new TrueCut rotary cutter and the ruler it 'grooves along with'.  Perfect 1/32" strips anyone? (As if!)

One good distraction deserves another, so I'm now trying to work up the courage to make

Carolyn Friedlander's Slow Sewing Studio Social Tote. For those of you considering this, allow me to make a correction to the pattern for you...the very first instruction is "Read through all instructions before beginning project".  Change that to "Read through all instructions FORTY TWO (42) times before beginning, if you are still even the slightest bit confused, RUN AWAY." (The fact that the seam allowances on this are 1/2" should have warned you--and if that didn't do it, then maybe you should have taken a clue from the fact that you need 3 different types of interfacing/stabilizer for this project.)

But, I am a glutton for punishment, so I shall hold my head high and soldier through this project for the next hour, after which I will take a much needed break to make Mexican Chocolate Cheesecake and suck down a Margarita (rocks/salt) in honor of National Margarita Day.

Something tells me that I am going need more than one of those to finish this project this weekend.

Ole!