The Rest Of The Apron Story

Yesterday I went by Bernina Connection to pick up my "award winning" apron and my award, this delightful little book with pictures and stories of aprons from times gone by. I was interested to read that the author made an apron for her mom in 7th. grade in USA and as my son made one for me in 7th. grade in Germany and I made my Mum's in Australia in 7th. grade, it must be a 7th. grade tradition in the Western world!

You can see my entry, #14, in the picture above.

There were 52 aprons in the competition and many more offered simply for display.
I hope that BC will celebrate Apron Month again next year, it was fun.

I drew a number from the comments on VTT this week, number 10 was the lucky one! That would be CC from "Lace'n Ribbon Roses" blog, I will contact her to see if she would like to have an apron. I have decided to add a bonus item to go with each of the aprons, one of my selvedge pot holders.

Here is CC's apron and pot holder ready to mail off to her and while I cannot promise to match up a coordinating pot holder every time, I will certainly do my best!

One of my two new projects is the Carolina Christmas Mystery quilt by Bonnie Hunter because I have a small stack of Christmas fabrics that have sat around way too long and I really want to get them out of my stash, I am tired of looking at them.

These two pics show step one in Carolina Christmas quilt, I am pulling in other green scraps since I only have a couple of Christmas greens.

Unfortunately I have very few lights/neutrals in my stash so I was using mostly plain muslin for the first two steps then as luck would have it BC have their Christmas fabrics at half price so I selected half a dozen light neutral Christmas fabrics and bought half a yard of each-I don't want to have it left over, so I hope I wasn't too skimpy in my purchase.
I think we need 5 yards of the light background and since I have already completed the first step I am hoping this additional yardage will suffice. Otherwise I will be forced to return to the quilt shop.......LOL!

We also need a couple of yds. of gold fabric so I added a half yard of a gold to the purchase.

Now I am doing the Fandango!

Here is the second of my new projects, the Fandango quilt from the latest issue of Quiltmaker magazine. The directions were not for foundation piecing but it's going wicked fast with a muslin foundation. I am paying little attention to which fabric goes next, except to keep some light/dark variation. This was my first block.

This rocks, I already have 35 blocks in just three evenings and my overflowing basket of 1.5" scrap strips is empty! Now I am digging into the 2.5" basket, this method is a great way to get rid of scraps. I remind myself that I paid the same per yard for the scraps of fabric as I did for the rest of it! At any other time I would never have put all of these weird and wonderful color combinations in any one block but they really look pretty and the quilt has lots of movement.
Here you can see I have begun on the little border blocks. They are a a bit tedious, only 4.25" square but at least they are fairly fast, being so small. At first I had thought to make one long narrow block for the border and if I think about it for a bit I can probably figure out how to make it work that way instead of having to join up 60 total of the tiny squares.

Tomorrow I do not have the baby Matthew so I hope to get caught up on the next 4 steps of Bonnie's mystery and perhaps work some more on the Fandango border.