Gypsy Wife courthouse steps

My weekend was unexpectedly truncated by a day trip to Wellington on Friday for work turning into an overnight sojourn when bad weather closed Wellington airport. My colleague and I spent many more hours than can be considered pleasant at the airport waiting as planes tried to land and got diverted, until finally at 10pm they let us know they were giving up for the night. We finally made it back to Auckland around lunchtime on Saturday feeling a little crumpled and out of sorts!

As a result today was a quiet sewing day -  I could only cope with the thought of something simple so I spent some time making a few courthouse blocks as part of this month's Gypsy Wife schedule. These are not difficult to make, but it takes me sooooooo long to choose which fabrics to put together. My process is pretty sophisticated. I tip all the fabric I have earmarked for this project into a pile onto the floor and take it from there :-)

It's funny process. Sometime my selections work better than I expect,

Other times, I'm less keen on the outcome. I think this is due to the size of some of the pieces which kind of distorts the effect you had when you auditioned bigger pieces of fabric together. This block is only 5.5" and has some 1 inch strips in it.

I like this sweet looking block and am feeling quite smug about that little join in the lower right corner. I made myself slow down and pay attention to matching up the polka dots and am so pleased that I did!

Courthouse steps

It was a sad day around the country today and at school as we remembered the devastation of the Christchurch earthquake. I got home and decided I wanted to immerse myself in some sewing to unwind. I'm still on my 'learning new things' project so I thought I'd tackle some courthouse steps - using Kim's really great tutorial.
I wasn't really too taken with my first effort:

I think I was too distracted thinking about construction and wasn't really thinking about the fabric. Not such a great idea to have the centre all the same colour. The second one I liked a bit better:

I'm not convinced courthouse steps are for me. Maybe they will grow on me. Hmmmmm.

In other news we had our first AMQG meeting of the year last night. We have a new challenge: Make a NICU quilt (neonatal intensive care unit) - the only real rule is that we have to use a design or block we haven't used before. I think that might be hard for some of the more experienced quilters!