W.I.P. It Good

Over the weekend my husband and I celebrated our 9-year anniversary.  We decided to take a trip to Napa, sans children.  After a relaxing weekend (in which I imbibed a little too much wine on an empty stomach and paid dearly for it), we returned home to the Bay Area at the tail end of a heat wave.  Missing the comforts of an air-conditioned hotel room, I nevertheless sat down to do a little sewing.

In my previous post, I was in the midst of receiving converging corners blocks from the ladies of the do. Good Stitches Love Circle.  All blocks arrived by the end of last week, and here they are sewn up together:

I played around with the block layout on the living room floor for so long that my husband finally suggested that I just pick them randomly from a pile.  Into a pile they went!  With the exception of a tiny bit of rearranging to break up all of the red-centered blocks, the random block setting worked pretty well.  My task this week is to piece the back and choose and prepare the binding fabric.

I also finished up some polaroid blocks for the *Picture Perfect* Polaroid Block Swap.  Using a tutorial by capitola quilter, this group is making the blocks without the background fabric.  I literally spent more time pulling the fabric from my stash than I did sewing these blocks.  The fussy-cut centers had been waiting for days for their white borders.  I'm ashamed at leaving these to the last minute when they were so quick and easy to do.

 
Though I finished the blocks to send in, I'm counting these as a WIP since I haven't made any yet to keep for myself.  Thank goodness I'm not so organized that I put the fabric away after I was done!

Completing these blocks inspires me to pick up a WIP that started off strong but got lost in the shuffle.

My poor girl says she's been waiting for her Poetica quilt for ages.  But what feels like ages to a 9-year old is a small pocket of time in the eyes if a quilter (it's only been 3 months since I started her quilt).  Anyway, after playing around a little with the block layout, Martina and I felt the top looked too busy.  She smartly decided she wants sashing between the blocks.  This is great as it gives me a little more time to work on sewing up the rest of the blocks while we wait for the fabric.

Linking up with Lee at Freshly Pieced.