BOM, PHXMQG and Paper Piecing Make for a GREAT Day!

 Kathy and I started off our day by heading north to 35th Ave. for the BOM and black bag day.  This is the block for this month...ours is of course in black and we have to make four blocks each.  This block looks MUCH easier to do than last month's!  Kathy cut the fabric last night and we plan to sew them today.  We met up with Ros (briefly) at the store and with BJ and Jacki who also joined us for  lunch in Chandler before Kathy dropped me at the PHXMQG meeting.  BJ surprised us with a starfruit pincushion--each!  I owe you BJ!  So thoughtful of her to make extra while she was doing her swap pincushion!

At the meeting, Jill and I traded mug rugs (she was unable to trade a few months ago but wanted to participate) so she got a granny square one, and I LOVE my new hexie flower mug rug.  She used a rainbow variegated thread on the edges and it really is so pretty.   It is so funny, I have wanted to make mug rugs for forever, and now that I did and traded with several people I now have four different ones!

 At the meeting, I participated in the Emerald Challenge.  I was so tickled to hear I was not the only one frantically working on a challenge piece (or the pincushion) literally at the eleventh hour!  There just aren't enough sewing hours in the day.  Here are the participants with their items and a close up of the items too.

Lora with her thread catcher, Nancy with her pincushion, Me with my pillow, Tracy (Kirstin's mom, lol) with her pincushion, Becca with her pillow, Christi with her wallet and Jen with a quilt!

So many shades of emerald.  Way to represent girls!

 Now I just need to finish the Spoolin Around quilt this pillow goes with!

These are the pincushions we received in the trade (not the ones we made).  Nancy, BJ, Christi, me, Barb, Bonnie--she got mine, Ann Becca, Lora and Tracy (Kirstin's mom, lol!).  

 This is the one I got from Becca!  It is heavy and each side has a different fabric on it.  It has lots of personality!

Our program yesterday was learning Paper Piecing.  My friend Allisa (who also just replaced our treasurer) taught the workshop.  She did a great job and spent time with each of us individually (some of us more than others, lol it was my first time really!) helping us catch on.

 I have done this at least once before but I remember giving up because I kept putting the fabric on backwards.  We had six new people at our meeting and I was lucky enough to be sitting across from Sarah (one of them) and she had the seam ripper that I forgot and spent some of her time helping me (as did Jacki behind me!) until it finally started to make sense!  Sarah is also a Bonnie Hunter fan--I knew I liked that girl the minute she said hi!  She and I kept repeating a phrase about lining the seam allowance up where you want the fabric to go--which I now can't recall, but it helped alot!  You can see from the picture that I caught on and was tickled to death.  However, I didn't have a color coding of the bottle and it wasn't until I was COMPLETELY finished that I realized I was supposed to have white on the triangle parts at the top of the bottle.  I do believe I will rip it apart and fix it later on but Alissa (and Sarah and Jacki) taught me well because I came home and did more!

 Bonnie's newest Quiltmaker block is Wild and Goosey and I figured I would just do one tiny corner of the block (it takes awhile!) but I couldn't stop there...

 By the end of the night I had completed the block..posted it on facebook and had fallen in love with paper piecing and the block!

 While admiring it I suddenly realized one of my geese was flying the wrong direction!  So don't ask me how I was able to sleep last night without fixing it, but I did and this morning after helping out a friend with some ASL Linguistics homework I got the geese flying in the right direction!

So once again I have started another Bonnie Hunter project!  I am seriously her number one fan!  I am guessing this counts at my NewFo for April!