Swooning, Stitching, Setting Goals

I'm just dropping in for a quick post today.  I've got a couple little finishes, and one goal to share for May.

First off, I got to make this Swoon block for our Humility.Do.Good Stitches bee.  Isn't it great?  Jaime asked for blocks with red, black, and white.  She wanted us to use bold black and white prints.  Since I had NOTHING like that in my stash at the time, I went shopping and this is what I picked.  :)  Her quilt is going to turn out SOOOO awesome!

I just had to include my toes in this shot to prove just how HUGE this block is!  24" x 24"

Second, I've been plugging away slowly on my Quilty Stitches Sampler.  I got a little busy with some other stuff, so I fell behind.  But I gotta be honest - I prefer it that way.  I would hate to be fully caught up and suddenly have nothing to work on when the urge strikes!  ;)  Here are blocks 1-5.  SO.  MUCH.  FUN.

And thirdly, now that I've finished some major projects, I decided it was time to reorganize the scrap bin again.  Luckily, I came across Lori Holt's post and I am going to copy her strategy.  This picture isn't pretty, and you can see that I've been working along side my boys.  :)  

This brings my to my goal for ALYOF May.  A dear friend/colleague/mentor from my teaching days is retiring this year!  Naturally, I'm making something for her to celebrate.  I'll be using some of the aforementioned scraps to make something simple, but cute and hopefully useful.  Stay tuned!

Linking up:

Stitching Along

Have you heard of the Quilty Stitches Sampler-Along happening at Little Miss Shabby?  Every two weeks, Corey introduces a new quilt block inspired crosstitch pattern to us.  They are SO cute (and tiny)!  She has introduced two blocks so far, but there is plenty of time to jump in!  Crosstitching was my first love and it just so happened that the timing for this stitch-along was PERFECT for me and I have been wanting to stitch a sampler for awhile.  YAY! 

Here is my first block, Swoon:

I raided my embroidery floss stash (which, apparently isn't as neat as some of the lovely ones shared in the Flickr group), and pulled out some blues, purples, greens, and oranges.  Some of these are only small pieces because they are leftover from kits, but I think I'll probably have enough.  I'm excited to make something bright and cheery!

I'm a little bit behind because I somehow got it into my head that I needed to stitch all of my sashing FIRST, so that I could have an outline for placing my "blocks."  And it took FOREVER.  Ah well.  I'm using a scrap piece of Aida and I wanted to make sure it was big enough for all of the blocks.  Unfortunately, as I sat down to write this post, I realized that the stitch-along is only going to have 16 blocks and I somehow managed to make 24 spots in my layout!  Geez.  I think I'll go through and take out the bottom two rows so that I have 18.  Then I'll either make up two more or repeat two of my favorites.  

My Aida fabric looks white, but it's actually a cream color. 

You should check out the Flickr group!  There are some fun color combinations happening over there.  I'm really liking the ones with the dark backgrounds and the ones with the backgrounds left unstitched.  But NO, I am NOT going to unpick all of that white stitching and start over...

In other crosstitchy news, I don't think I've ever shared this with you!

 

I made this for my sister and brother-in-law for Christmas.  It's about a year and a half late, but oh well.  I tried to match the colors to their wedding colors - lime green and silver.  I love this cute pattern.

 Also, I blogged about this Christmas scene already, but I wanted to show it to you one more time.  You can read more about it and see more pictures of it HERE.