Something to Show Y'All

I don't know where I picked up that southern accent. Maybe it's the Paula Deen commercials for Smithfield hams--because hams aren't just for the holidays. And good Lord, speaking of ham, why do I want to cram fattening food in my mouth today? I'm not sure if it's because I'm feeling a need for high calorie comfort and stress relief or if it's just because I deserve a guilty little break from the healthy eating. So far, I've resisted, but I might need to do something crazy before too long.

Anyway, that's not what I planned to talk about at all. What I wanted to do was show you what I did today.

You know that Jelly Roll Sampler Quilt Along I've been working on? I know several of you have been doing it too. Well, I made the last of the 12 blocks.

No fancy embroidery on this one, but I like it. THEN, because I want to make my quilt square and use a four column by four row setting (rather than 12 blocks set three by four), I needed to make three more blocks. (Earlier on, there was a block I liked and I ended up making two, so by the time I finished the "12th block" today, I actually had 13.)

I like stars and there weren't any star blocks in the quilt so far, so I figured I'd start with that.

Then I decided I wanted another pumpkin (I already had one small pumpkin and a larger Jack O'Lantern, so this makes three.)

Finally, I had some vague notion of making something like a star but I thought the star points might look like legs and if I made it black, it might look like a spider. Nope! It just looked like a black star. So then I cut it apart, trimmed a little off, and added the center "+" part. Yep, that'll do fine!

And here are all 16 blocks stuck up on the design wall.

I'm planning on using a Twist N'Turn setting like I did on this quilt:

And, by the way, that quilt above? I also finished that one. I quilted it over the past several days and finished up the binding this afternoon.

Here's a close up of the quilting on one of the blocks--I figured I'd carry through the general floral theme from the fabric, and that was pretty simple to quilt freehand. I just traced the center circle and freehanded the petals until they filled the space.

Of course, I really wasn't supposed to be doing very much sewing today with so much to be done about clearing out the Wild Child's room, but I made progress on that too. Most of today's chores involved sorting through things I'd been storing in the garage and deciding what to keep, what to throw away, what to send off to Goodwill, and what could be put into a separate storage unit we've rented for the Wild Child's furniture she'll be bringing with her. With that work just about done, tomorrow I can start to pack my things up in her bedroom and move them onto the garage shelves I emptied today. So progress is being made, AND I've managed to have a little quilting fun too. Yep, life was much better today!

Weekends! Don't you just love them?