Just Three for March

I had a pretty good record for Traceyjay's Just Three feature for December and January...did I keep it up in February?  Let's see...

February's goals were:

1. Complete Gen X Quilter's Sisters' Ten BOM Susannah blocks - check!

 

 

2. Finish Little Bookworms - check!  I mentioned that I had a special goal and since I met my self-imposed challenge, I wanted to share...our little town's library has a very cool feature that each month, a resident is chosen to be the Artist of the Month.  You get a write-up in the library newsletter and on their website and selected works are hung around the library for the month.  Well, I am the Artist of the Month during March!!  So I really, really wanted the Bookworms to be finished so I could feature it in the library - how perfect is that?  The children's librarian has talked about making a little game of pointing the characters out to kids coming and going during the month - it just makes me happy to share it with everyone!

3. New shower curtain inspired by Rachel at Stitched in Color - I loved a very pretty shower curtain that she finished and wanted to do a version of my own with this color inspiration:

BWAAAHAA!!!!  Excuse me while I wipe the tears from my eyes....yeah, that just didn't even remotely happen.  I'm not quite sure how I thought I was going to get that fit in with everything else, but oh well.  To give myself a little bit of credit, I did buy some fabrics for it, but I've been doubting my choices as well as a possible pattern...I guess I'm just having a hard time making some final design choices.  I'll get to it eventually.

Now as for my March goals...

1. Complete the Sisters' Ten blocks for March.  It's already been released last Friday, so it's waiting around for me when I get to it!

2.  Our BMQG retreat is giving me the perfect chance to start working on the Anna Maria Horner feather blocks that I've been planning for a while.  I can't wait to see how they turn out.  I'm still not sure how large I'm going to make it or how many blocks I'll fit onto the top - I'm willing to fly by the seat of my pants on this one a little bit.

3.  Hexies!  I started working on this handwork project last month and have been working on it here and there.  I'm enjoying the process and really liking how its all coming together, so you can plan on seeing some of the larger pieces in progress during the month.

Linking up with:

Very, Very Late to the Party...

I did a little fun magazine and book shopping a few days ago - they're like candy for crafty adults but get set aside and ignored until the blissful two hours in the afternoon when both girls are napping.  If you haven't checked out Quilty magazine yet, its definitely worth a look!  As for my new book, Hexa Go-Go by Tacha Bruecher...well, I don't know if you've heard of this crazy trend sweeping the quilting world called "the hexie." Oh wait.  That's old news?  Like 2 years old?  Yeah, I'm pretty behind the times.  But I might actually be catching up.

Honestly, I've been reading about other people's hexagon quilts for a while now and loved seeing the final result, but they just seemed so labor intensive!  I've tried handsewing before and it's just not my thing.  That and I didn't really see any designs that I was crazy about.  But a few weeks ago, I saw a couple of bloggers doing hexies in a snowflake pattern and that peaked my interest!  I decided to do a little playing around with my fancy-schmancy quilting software (cough...I copied a jpeg into Paint and used the rinky-dink "fill" feature...cough) to do up a couple potential designs that I truly love. 

I honestly couldn't decide between a sunset color scheme with white outlines (just ignore the black hexies in the sketch and imagine white instead) or a green/blue/purple combo with black outlines that reminds me of stained glass.  So I went the truly overboard road and decided to do both.  I'll do a smaller hexie size for the sunset scheme and it will be like my practice run for the larger stained glass version.  And I'm going to TRY to relax and do it here and there whenever I can.   After all, you're supposed to take your time with hexies, right?

Oh yeah, there's one more thing that I'm really late to the party to discover...Downton Abbey.  I realize that it's been the toast of tv for a while now, but Season 1 has been sitting on my Netflix queue for ages and I decided that sitting down with some hexie fun might be a good way to check it out.  Several days worth of the girls' nap time later and almost into Season 2, I am hooked!  I'm rooting for Mr. Bates and Anna while whipstiching and booing the awful O'Brien and dastardly Thomas as I'm basting my fabric.  It's just so darn good...I know that I'm going to fly through all the episodes too quickly. 

Yep, I'm enjoying this project so far.  My only regret is that I was so late to begin with.

Linking up: