Weekend projects

I have a retreat coming up so I am kind of tossing ideas around as to what I am going to work on during that getaway!  I have many many unfinished projects so there is no shortage of possibilities.
And though I have lots of  unfinished projects that didn't stop me from starting a new project when these fabrics came in the shop this week from Riley Blake Fabrics. I scooped them up and quickly whipped this up:

I cut it all out at Free Sew on Friday night and then worked on it over the weekend so I am ready to audition borders for it tomorrow. I had never done a kaleidoscope block before and since I had heard such wonderful things about Marti Michele rulers and templates I thought I would give one a whirl for this projects so I used this guy:

The 45 degree end has the tip cut off ( at the top in the picture) and it made the centers of my blocks go together beautifully without bulkiness. I highly reccommend this ruler. It has two other edges useful for other blocks like spiderweb block, crossed canoes and more. Handy!
I also watched the new True Grit movie last night with my family. Beau Bridges did a great job and they stuck to the original story pretty well I thought ( which was great and well worth sticking to in my opinion!). While we watched the movie I laid out my next Ticker Tape block in Reds:

Tetris with fabrics! Totally addicting. This may win out as my retreat project. I can't wait to have them all done and see the finished project.

Oh my gosh it has been 2 weeks!

It has been a busy couple of weeks and I have been doing a lot of sewing too. I was hired to make an baby quilt with a Texas A&M theme.  First thing I had to learn was what the official school colors were! I am not from Texas so don't yell at me! I thought it was maroon and gray but my friend Teresa informed me that gray was just thrown in occasionally and that they were really maroon and white.
The customer wanted something traditional so I flipped through my Amish quilt books and found a block I had always liked which is called a variety of things "Bachelor's Puzzle"," Snail's Trail" etc...
I have made this block in miniature and donated it to the Ami Simms Alzeheimer's Quilt Auction a few years ago but those were 3 inch blocks finished which made me a little insane. The whole quilt was 9"x12".

I decided NOT to make the block THAT small again this time though. Since it was a baby's quilt I decided an 8" block would be cute and wouldn't make me nuts.

Here is the resulting Texas A&M quilt for baby JR:

It measures 48"x48".

I quilted it on my new longarm which I have limited skill using thus far but, I played to my strengths and it came out great.

I have also been working on a ticker tape quilt. Another blog I read is doing a quilt-along called Bottled Rainbows.  I decided to try the technique and see if I liked it.

It was a 100% hit for me and is a great stash buster.  It is a quilt as you go technique that you do block by block. Here is my first block all in baby blues:

More will definitely follow as this was a super cool technique and I liked the result. It reminds me of my favorite video game TETRIS that I played as a teen. I won't go into detail about how to do the technique as the Stitched in Color blog outlines it beautifully and I highly reccommend you click over to her blog and check it out!
I also think there is a lot of design potenitial so I am going to play with some designs and do them ticker tape style to see how they look.