My favorite Christmas gift so far...

is a lovely pair of pot holders made for me by my friend and fellow-quilter Robyn Bellamy. She's really talented and always works with great fabrics, and I think she was going to start an Etsy site. If I can get the link I'll list it for you so you can see more of her work.

Week 4 of Bonnie's mystery

I'm afraid this photo doesn't do it justice but I wanted to get something up so I could link up!

Grand Illusion Mystery: Week 3

Was anyone else as relieved as I was not to have to work with tiny triangles this week???? Please note, I'm not whining, I'm just really happy to be able to sew some simple squares together for a change. I'm having lots of fun working on this mystery, and love looking at everyone's progress on Bonnie's blog.
If you want to check out some of the others' work, please click here

Week 2 of the Grand Mystery

I managed to get a bunch of the pieces cut and a few of them sewn together this weekend. I used the 3rd method Bonnie suggested, with the bonus half-square units, thinking it would be fun to have the extras for some future project. Here's a representative sample so far:

Can't wait to link up and see what everyone's been doing! If you want to see their progress, click this link

Ginny

Week 1---Bonnie Hunter's Grand Illusion Mystery!

Woo Hoo! It's finally time for this year's mystery!
Here's a photo of a bit of my progress so far on the first week's clue. I've changed the colors a bit from Bonnie's suggestions, just for the fun of it. My main color is orange, instead of yellow, just because when I went to the quilt store to scout for fabrics that day it was the orange I fell in love with.
Greetings to all fellow mystery quilters! I know we're going to have a fun journey together.
Best wishes,
Ginny in Brooklyn

Woven bar blocks and Modern Sampler

I made just 2 woven bar blocks for the October Block Lotto drawing, but I think they're pretty sweet and wouldn't mind winning them. I also whipped up 4 more in blue and white fabrics for my Mod Mod Sample quilt.

Here's my latest progress on the sample quilt. Although it's hard to see from this photo I've sewn some of these blocks together to form larger units, following the pattern for the Queen-sized quilt, and others have been put together in smaller units, waiting to be attached to blocks we'll make in November and December.

I'm really enjoying putting together the sampler and am excited to see it finished.  

Celebration!

"Celebration" is the theme of the Quilter's Guild of Brooklyn's fall small quilt challenge, and here's my entry: a sun in a bright blue sky and a field of flowers. Can you tell I was in the midst of celebrating my summer vacation when I came up with this idea? I used a paper-pieced pattern from  Block Lotto earlier this summer to make the sun, and fussy-cut the flowers from fabric from my stash and appliquéd them on.

I wasn't able to make the flower stems as thin as I wanted them from fabric without them getting all wonky, so I used my sewing machine to create a few stems with green thread. And I used my walking foot and orange thread to quilt it with straight lines radiating from the sun.

I've wanted to cut printed images from fabric and applique them to another quilt since I first saw examples of this technique in some antique quilts in the Shelburne Museum in Vermont some years back. This little quilt was fun to make, and I think it's pretty cute. Now I can't wait to see how everyone else interpreted the concept of celebration, and I'll post photos if I can get some good shots.