What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

I can rise to a challenge, particularly and most especially when I am told that it can't be done. When visiting a precious vendor booth at MidAtlantic Quilt Festival I saw a small wall hanging displayed, it was called "Courtyard Garden" and the star units were made up from diamond and kite shaped pieces. I fell in love with it at first sight and inquired about the pattern. I was told that it

I can rise to a challenge, particularly and most especially when I am told that it can't be done. When visiting a precious vendor booth at MidAtlantic Quilt Festival I saw a small wall hanging displayed, it was called "Courtyard Garden" and the star units were made up from diamond and kite shaped pieces. I fell in love with it at first sight and inquired about the pattern. I was told that it

Another finish!  Yeah!

In the fall of 2015, the day guild (Near North Quilter's Guild) had a challenge using a pizza box.  Instructions were inside the box on what to do.  We were urged to sign up and have fun.

Where did the pizza boxes come from?  Karen K went to a pizza store and bought a whole bunch of empty boxes.  They must have thought she was a little crazy. 

I signed up and my focus fabric was a 1 metre of blue fabric (quel surprise!) that we had to put inside our pizza box along with one ...

You guys are chock full of organizing ideas, funny stories and admissions, and comforting statements about how I’m so not alone in my disorganized state! And it’s good to hear from those of you who are ahead of the game — it gives me hope! Thank you all for playing along and chiming in.

As of noon yesterday, my big pile and my cutting table didn’t look any better than they did the first time I showed them to you. In fact, the cutting table looked worse, because I was dragging stuff out of the pile on the ...

Time for the final task of this year’s Final Countdown — that went fast!

You have all been working hard! I can tell from the comments, the blog post links, the photos I’ve seen, and the emails I’ve been getting — and just let me say right now, I’m sooo comforted to know that I’m not alone on any of this! Whew! You are all my kindred spirits in the quilting world — haha!

For our last task, I like to take the physical labor out, since the first two are generally hard work — at least for me ...

So did you make any progress yesterday? If you’re a morning person, I apologize. I screwed up the scheduling time of the post, and it was nearly noon when it came out. So I’m a little earlier today! And never fear, you have until January 7th to complete all the tasks. Lord knows it’s for sure gonna take me that long to get them done, if I can even manage it by then!

So here we go with today’s task:

Deal with a pile

I realize this may feel somewhat similar to yesterday’s task, but ...

I hope you’re ready for our first task of this year’s Final Countdown!

If you’ve been reading along or following me on Instagram this year, you can probably guess what our first task is:

Clean off your main work surface

Here’s the current state of mine:

I’ve been working on this one ALL year, and I haven’t gotten it completely clean even one time. In fact, here’s a photo of it from January 1, 2018:

A few months ago, I got out a notepad, and made a list of exactly how many projects ...

My, my, 2018 went by in a flash! And I can hardly believe that this is the 10th year we’ve been doing The Final Countdown!

But I still NEED to do it. As usual, I still have many things to deal with and organize. How about you?

These last few days of the year are always my last chance to wrap up as many loose ends as possible so I can start the new year off fresh. I’m never as organized as I’d like to be at the beginning of a year, but each year, I think ...

Bamboozle this quilt instead! ;) Sharing another quilt today that I never did blog about.  It kind of screamed that it wanted to be called Bamboozle to me since pandas love bamboo, and it's a pretty easy and quick make. I drew it up when Riley Blake requested a panda quilt for an upcoming fabric line (Last year! That's how behind on blogging I am!), called Panda Love by Kelly Panacci.

Yesterday was a fabulous day! Our improv small group (the comedy club quilters) had a sew day. We had been planning for quite a while to have a lightening round robin, like Sherri Lynn Wood describes in her book. We finally had the opportunity to do it yesterday. Six of us gathered at a retreat center and set to work.

Before we even arrived, each of us had prepared our center block....

The modern quilt guild issued another fabric challenge and I jumped on board! First of all, free fabric, duh! and second, I really enjoy challenges. We received three colors of the hash dots fabric and peach solid cotton couture, a fat eighth of each. Since it is ok to add other Michael Miller solids, I ordered some of the Marine Cotton Couture, which matched one of the hash dots we received. And, like always, it sat on my cutting table for weeks waiting for me to be inspired.

Finally, I decided to do a variation on my Funky Dresden pattern ...

I belong to the Hands of Friendship Quilt Guild in Kirksville, Missouri, and every year, we issue a challenge to our members. We have some really fun challenges!

This past year, my friend, Andrea, and I were in charge of the challenge. Andrea said she’d been wanting to do a Log Cabin, so that’s what we did. To make it a bit more challenging, we specified that the center square of all the Log Cabin blocks had to be the color of your birthstone (along with a few other rules about size, etc.)

We got 19 entries in ...