A little Christmas mystery

At the beginning of December there are many items on my Christmas to-do list, and starting a new quilt project was not one of them but...

Kathleen Tracy announced a blue and white winter themed mystery quilt with only 4 steps and I just had to jump in and participate.  Kathleen has a group on Facebook called "Small Quilt Lovers" and I have been a fan of her projects for a while.  Her instructions said this would be a simple project and could be done using just a couple of blue fat quarters and a cream colored contrast.

I could have made 8 little "X" squares in less than an hour using strip piecing techniques, but where is the fun in that?  No, instead I pulled out all my dark blue/indigo prints and chose 8 different ones.

Naturally, I had to seek out 8 different cream colored background fabrics too. Then sew them all up into 8 cute little "X" blocks, that will finish at 3 inches.

I have a striped blue and tan fabric that I'm hoping will be a nice border stripe, but not knowing what the rest of the quilt will look like, I won't know if I will end up using it.

Amazing what fun you can have when you are putting off the items on your to-do list.

Weekend Sewing

Chilly and rainy weather this weekend made it a good weekend to stay in and sew.  I finished the next 2 blocks in my quilt  guild's Half Square triangle block of the month:

The pinwheel block on the left can only be made with 16 half square triangles, but it was tempting to make the one on the right by substituting Flying Geese like this:

However, I guess that would be contrary to the name of this quilt which is "Half Square Triangle Sampler", so I stuck with the program.  Here are the first 4 blocks:

Our guild is making Adult Clothing protectors as our charity project this Christmas. Basically they are adult bibs.   When my father developed Parkinson's disease, his shaky hands could make it hard to keep food from slipping off the fork or spoon and so I know firsthand how handy it was to have something to keep his clothes clean at mealtimes.  This weekend  I bought some fun, yet manly, fabrics and got them cut out and ready to sew into protectors.

Our guild is also having a fun challenge this year, which is to use a magazine photo as inspiration for a quilt.  I found a great page for my inspiration and spent the greater part of my sewing this weekend making the quilt top.   Can't share a photo of it  yet, but here are the fabrics I was working with:

Seems our quilt guild is keeping us busy with sewing this year!