Another Sewing Day!

So yesterday Kathy and I cut and sewed and tied all afternoon and evening long! The Arizona Quilt now is tied and has the binding machine sewed on and just needs hand sewn closed.

We started and finished my first I Spy Quilt which was fast, easy and a lot of fun. Kathy cut up hexagons and squares to do five more I Spy quilts later on when we have enough charms to do it. I had bought a pack of charms on ebay which is the bulk of the first quilt, but unless I buy another pack it will be awhile before I can do another one since you need so many different ones for each I Spy quilt.

Next we worked on my "Walk in the Park" quilt from Quilter's Home magazine (my favorite!) which has lots of applique which I don't usually do. We got to putting the applique on and discovered that we had only made about half the pieces--apparently I didn't do the math right. So we had more work there than we expected. We got all eight applique blocks assembled and the day before yesterday I had gotten the checkboard type blocks done. I just have to figure out how to actually do the applique so it looks good, then we can assemble the top. I expect that will take months and be done in between other projects since I am not sure I would have the patience to do it all in a row. I do love the colors in it though and it will help me get through this long last winter here in Wisconsin. I need to take pictures of this one to post yet.

My other passion is reading. I belong to an online bookgroup (used to be the Oprah bookgroup when she first had one but we had to change the name so we are the Bookies now) and every year we post our best and worst, etc. I didn't read near as many books as usual this year and I didn't find that many "best" books either. So in no particular order my favorite this year are:

Water for Elephants by S. Gruen
Quilts by D. Schmidt
A Thousand Splendid Suns by K. Hosseini
Northanger Abbey by J. Austin
Down in the Common: A Year in the Life of a Mideval Woman by A. Baer
Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

Modern Quilt by W. Ringle and B. Kerr