I have jumped right in with swaps lately! I did the After Sewing Summit swap with a dozen or so friends (and received an awesome table runner and trivet) and a pincushion swap and received really cute flower shaped pincushions. I also did the Covert Robin swap and sent my partner a pair of matching zipper pouches.

I even managed to line the fabric up!

One of the pouches is flat and the other has box corners. I love the pair of these!

I received an awesome bag with a paper pieced star from Leigh. I love it! I love cowboy fabrics and paper piecing. Great swap!

I sent this cute Liberty pincushion to my swap partner last month. The top is one of the blocks from Elizabeth’s Lucky Stars block of the month and the back is sort of crazy quilt pieced. I just didn’t want the Liberty scraps to be wasted!

I love pincushions and try to keep my collection to a minimum. Here are the very cute ones I received!

I love that they are not a traditional shape. These are small enough that I have been using them when I hand sew.

The past couple of weeks have been crazy busy and of course my lonely blog has taken the hit. Last week was spent picking out fabric for various projects. How about we take a look at what I picked out.

First up we have my fabrics for the Sugar Block club! This is a block of the month program that includes a recipe. I may need to pull more fabric for this one. Last year I did the HST BOM (half square triangle block of the month) that Jeni Baker hosted and each month I made two blocks. I find it just as easy to make two blocks rather than one and I’m thinking this may be the case here as well.

For this fabric pull I started with the three fabrics on the bottom, then I grabbed other solids and color and white fabrics. The three have so much color in them that I didn’t want a print with a lot of color to be overwhelming.

Next up we have a lot of beautiful fabric for the Lucky Stars BOM! I love this BOM. I have only made one block so far, and it wasn’t even for my quilt, it was for a pincushion swap. This is paper piecing, which isn’t difficult, but I don’t have plans to make more then one of each star. I may make both sizes (two sizes are given for each block – six inch and twelve inch (finished)).

For this one I wanted a bright floral as the focus. This BOM calls for 9-10 half yards and you can see I have 24. This will give me more variety and maybe when I pulled the fabrics I intended to make two of each.

This is Christmas fabric for the virtual quilting bee hosted by Amy at Diary of a Quilter. These are smaller blocks, 8 inches finished. I may need to pick more fabric for this as well because this is only 8 months long and I definitely need more blocks for a quilt. I picked the Joy layer cake for this and I need to find another (I wonder if I can!) in order to make it bigger.

One of my nieces has a little girl and in our family girls are precious. Okay children in general are precious, but for some reason we have a lot of boys in our family. And I mean A LOT. My brothers and I have 14 children between us and only two are girls. My niece is one of three children (she was also outnumbered by boys growing up) and so when her daughter was born, my excitement could not be held in. I try to send something to the little girl a couple of times a year just for the fun of it. I am going to make her a lined drawstring bag. It may end up reversible, thus the extra fabric choices.

This is for another drawstring bag for a friend and I just realized it is pictured upside down!

These are the fabrics I picked for the Fresh Mini Club! This is hosted by Megan at Canoe Ridge Creations. I am looking forward to this and have something fun in mind as the club goes on this year. I love the Daisy Janie fabrics and this latest line is beautiful.

And finally we have my strips for a scrappy trip along. Everyone on instagram was scrappy tripping along when I was moving! Or maybe it was when we were moving in. It was at a time when I just could not participate, but I thought about what I wanted to do. I don’t have a lot of Halloween fabric, but I have some, and I always intend to make a quilt. This trip along is themed and I am planning on quilting it with glow in the dark thread.

There you have it! I hope you enjoyed looking at all of this beautiful fabric on a Monday morning!

Basting isn’t my favorite, in fact I think it’s my least favorite thing about quilting. It is probably why I have several quilt tops, and not several finished quilts. I think I may just save up so I can pay someone else to quilt for me.

But baste I must! I usually use safety pins. It’s easier to do that when you have a hard floor to baste on. The only place I have in this house is the kitchen. Housekeeper extraordinaire I’m not, so I never think the floor is clean enough. Even after I mop I don’t think it’s clean enough.

I have a Drtiz basting gun that I’ve used a handful of times. I’m sure you can get different sized tags to use, but the ones I have are just a little too long. I learned right away that it was easier to put both sides of the tags on top of the quilt, like this picture:

I put the tags near the seam because I feel like the needle makes a big hole in the fabric. Maybe that doesn’t matter once it’s quilted and washed, but I still do it that way.

You have to be careful when putting the needle in and pushing it back to the front, if the gap is too big then the fabric will bunch, like here:

The gun is really easy to use. It comes with a grid, if it doesn’t you definitely want one. I used the grid when basting this quilt because I laid it out on my table. The needle would ruin anything it poked and I love my table. Here is the grid under the quilt and the gun through the quilt.

That baby quilt I posted about a few weeks ago – I finished it! I did diagonal lines in one direction across it. I did not quilt through the center of the alphabet blocks. I like how it turned out! This was a late gift so after rushing to get the binding on, I mailed it, and a note let me know that it arrived at home when the baby came home from the hospital.

Alphabet Baby Quilt

I also finished a Christmas gift in January. I know, I know. I’m crazy late. My only excuse is that it is for my husband’s Uncle and we knew we weren’t going to be seeing them until sometime in January. This one quilted up super fast. I did lines in either side of the seams, both horizontally and vertically. I kind of wish I would have added another set of lines? It looked fine, I was just thinking about the design after the fact.

And this is the only picture I can find of it!

Chargers Quilt – just the top here

I did the binding on both of these quilts in two days! The rush to the post office and the rush to be ready for a late Christmas dinner will do that to a person. I need to find a better thimble.

Here is to a lot more finishes in 2013!