Project Gingham Underway

I had a whole list of winners.  You all shared such lovely memories with me, and I enjoyed going back in time to your childhood summers, popping popcorn to sell, learning to sew at the hand of your grandmother, going to Disneyland.

Congratulations to Rachel of The Life of Riley for joining me on Project Gingham.  The next day to watch for gingham in our quilts will be July 4th, Independence Day for those of us in the States.  That’s kind of the peak of summer for us in the Northern Hemisphere, celebrated with pie, homemade ice cream, lots of overeating (in a good way), and hanging out waiting for the sun to go down to cool us all off and so we can see the fireworks.  And a perfect day to see all these gingham projects!

I’ll post a list of all six of our blogs on here, and if you’ve taken the steps to dig some of the gingham out of your stash and have made  (or plan to make) a gingham quilt project (or ordered some online or even found some in local shops), send me your blog name and address and I’ll list you as well.  Deadline for me to write the blog post and get it listed is June 27th (after all, I’ve got some serious summer fun to attend to!).  What qualifies: a block, or four, or a mini-quilt, or a big quilt.  Check back (pun) and see the gallery of gingham!

While you may think all I do is gingham, I’ve had a couple of other projects going as well.  The above is all the squares, cut out, for my Summer Treat Quilt.

Here’s four sewn together and arranged up on the pinwall.  I like how the borders make a crown-type block.  I always like putting new blocks together to see the new patterns they make when they share borders.  While this does look productive, it’s really an avoidance of my other Grand Summer Project. . .

. . . getting the Lollypop Trees back on the radar.  I’ve pulled all the Kaffe Fasset/related fabrics out from the closet, and traced off the remaining blocks onto freezer paper (the scrolls).

I number all the pieces so I can tell which block they belong to.  Some have over 50 pieces.  And I have nine to go.  Now I’m thinking I’m a bit nuts and maybe I’ll just do nine blocks TOTAL, instead of 12.  Or the sixteen the original quilt called for.

Krista, of KristaStitched, invited me to join her and her friends in their Far-Flung Bee, so named because the members live all over the world.  I’ve never been in a bee.  That’s sort of admitting you’ve never eaten raspberries or gone skinny-dipping, or something.  But they’ve drawn up a schedule and some guidelines and I’m giving it a go.  I’ve gotten two blocks done, and am ready to start another person’s blocks.

Several months ago I put my name on the waiting list to take a class from Becky Goldsmith.  Today my lucky number came up!  The class is quickly approaching–next Tuesday–so tomorrow I’ve got to go out and try to find class supplies, then sew my background for her class on Applique Outside the Lines.  I’m soooo jazzed!