St Louis Star 2

A winter cold and some less-than-exciting sewing (backings zzzzz) have conspired to rob me of my sewing mojo. In an attempt to get it back, I decided to do some purpose-less sewing yesterday. You know, just for fun.

I went hunting in Quilters Cache and looking for something to take my fancy. The  St Louis Star 2 block caught my eye. I'm not hugely keen on paper piecing but I'm really pleased with how this turned out. It might even be promoted to 'starter block' for our Monday Modern round robin.

Today I got back to work on my Treasure Map blocks after a bit of a revelation. It is soooooo much easier cutting on the bench (I'm sure most of you know this).

See that pen? It's a Frixon pen. This is my latest favourite-handy-thing. It makes nice dark lines for marking and then they just iron away. I found it at Ribbon Rose.

I have two quilts about to be dispatched to Carol Longarm. (That's not actually her name, but its the name she goes by in my head). I'll be so pleased to get these back and bound and finished.

Round robin with Monday Modern

Our Monday Modern group has decided to do a round robin starting next month. It's not going to be a secret round robin, instead we will share progress with each other each month. Not having done a round robin before I wasn't sure what to do for my starter block. A couple of the others have done paper pieced blocks, but my first attempt focused on colour and shape.

After seeing Karyn's block I visited Bubblestitch just in case I want version two to be a paper pieced block . I'm very taken with the wolf block pictured below. I suspect this is because my poem-of-the-moment is called "Little Red Cap" by Carol Ann Duffy. It's in a collection of poems called "The World's Wife", if there is even the tiniest smidgen of the feminist in you, you ought to check it out.

...As soon as he slept, I crept to the back

of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with 

books.

Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head,

warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.

from Little Red Cap by Carol Ann Duffy