New Camera and new projects!

My husband did a little research for me and after reviewing my camera needs he found a camera for me and I went and bought it today. So far two thumbs up-- it is easy to use and takes a nice picture. It is a Nikon S8100 10x wide 12.1 mega pixel Coolpix, if you are interested. Hopefully it bounces but, if it doesn't I did get the 3 year warranty package!
On to new projects:

I have been working on this quilt for a couple of weeks now. 

All the fabrics are from Ginny Beyer's collections except the jadite green one. 

It is a pattern called Fab-tastic by Marlous Designs. 

My only criticism is that I decided to make mine a twin size version, which the pattern gives the specifications for, but it was a pretty skimpy twin size.  I added another row of squares to mine. Fortunately the fabric requirements were a little inflated so I was able to make 4 more blocks with no additional fabric purchases.

It is mostly strip pieced so it went together pretty quickly. I did have to slow down to add the piping but I am glad I did because it really makes the quilt for me.  I used Susan Cleveland's Piping Hot  Binding Tool for the piping and it sure makes it easy!

Now for the quilting... I have been chomping at the bit to try the curved cross hatching quilting. I am an avid reader of the Green Fairy Quilts blog. She uses this technique often (as well as many other awesome techniques) in her quilts it just looked really cool to me. I decided to try it on this quilt. All the floating black paisley squares have 3/4" curved cross hatching in them made using these:

These are from Lakeside Quilt Company. 

Each square of cross hatching took 18 minutes and there are 24 squares. 

So just those alone took 8 hours, but I LOVE how they came out and I can't wait to try it on some other quilts.  I am now waiting for some purple thread to arrive so I can finish the rest of each block.

I took a class with Karla Alexander in February and she encouraged me to play with the Creative Grids rulers and design some quilts. I have this ruler called Straight Out of Line and it is designed by Karla.

I have been playing with it on paper (because EQ is still somewhat a challenge for me)

And finally decided to play with it on some fabric, here is a preview of my quilt.

More on that later when we will do the big reveal!