not much sewing and a winner!

After that last post, I feel like I've been a slacker, but that's how it goes.  Some weeks you have more motivation and time and others you just roll with it...

I did try, on Friday, to make my Summer Fun quilt larger.  I had great plans for another checkerboard border on the sides and some other minor alterations.  And then realized I didn't have enough red.  And I couldn't get more - it had been a Christmas print...

Onward!

(With a little time allowed for exploring alternate possibilities as I sew mindlessly later...)

Saturday just kinda disappeared.  Between work and going to the drive-in restraunt about 30 minutes from here for a greasy gut-bomb (delicious) dinner, there went my day.

Yesterday, however, I rallied, and before I had to be to work at noon, I not only got groceries, but also cut all the pieces for this months' UFO!

It doesn't look like much, but with 16 pieces in each of 12 sections to make a giant paper pieced hexagon, this is progress.  It takes about an hour per piece for all 12 sections to place, sew, trim and press.  So this will be a more time-consuming block than some others, but this quilt WILL be done...well, the blocks, at least...by the end of this year!

Also, at guild on Thursday (yay for a day off work!), a friend gave me this:

It's from both her and her sister, but her sister is in an assisted living home now, tied down by an oxygen tank and very frail.  Her sister is the reason I joined the guild - she was so friendly when I went to a show a few years back I decided the group must be worth joining.  And the mug sits on a mug rug that the sister also gave all of us as a "quilt fairy" gift at retreat a few years back.  There are so many things in my sewing room that have come from quilty friends, it's wonderful to spend time in there and feel the presence of my friends, even if I am quilting alone.  Well, alone is a relative term.  I have five cats...and a hubby, but he avoids the sewing room like the plague!

And finally, on to the giveaway.  

A few of you commented but said no thanks.  I get it - I don't really need any more scraps either, but sometimes you just gotta!  And I have a whopping two contenders.  So to make it truly fair, I wrote each on a slip of paper and drew one from a hat.  Well, let's be honest.  I didn't really need a hat.  I just set them on the desk a while and chose one with my eyes closed...

Congrats to Frog Quilter!  I'll be sending you an e-mail shortly.  And if you get back to me early enough with your mailing address, they just might make it into the mail today!  (If not, probably Wednesday because I have the dreaded 8-4 shift on Tuesday - all the hours (and more) that my little Post Office is open!)

Time for me to go get sewing on those pieces I shared above!

Happy quilting,

Katie