New Projects

I love starting new projects!  It's so exciting!  A fresh beginning, such endless possibilities, anticipation.  I have been working on a couple of projects over the last couple of weeks.  For the first one, I started with this:

My favorite is the bird fabric in the middle, it's Bird Seed by Alexander Henry.  And I ended up with this:

It was way too dark to be trying to take this picture, but you get the general idea.  I'll take better shots after I get it quilted.  I know I should have gone ahead and done that step next, but I was so excited about this fabric I picked up a couple of weeks ago that I couldn't wait to start in on that project...do you ever do that?

This is fabric from several lines, but the bulk of it is from American Jane's Breath of Avignon.  It is not my normal palette or style, but I just love this fabric.  The pattern I am using calls for a layer cake, a charm pack and a jelly roll.  The quilt shop I found this at did not have any of the precuts, so I calculated what I would need in yardage and cut my own.  It didn't take as long as I thought it would, maybe a couple of hours...so now it looks like this:

I'll be posting more shots as I go, but I'm working on MatchBox by Abbey Lane Quilts.  It's an adorable quilt that is sewing up pretty quickly, but I found a pretty big error in the pattern.  It has you cut the strips 1/2" too big.  When you look at the large number of strips in this quilt, that's a lot of fabric waste.  I didn't figure this out until after I had done all of the cutting and started sewing the blocks.  A little frustrating.  I would think that a pattern designer would have someone test these patterns out before publishing?  I do plan to write them and let them know.  I read through the pattern twice to make sure I hadn't missed anything or miscalculated.....Oh well, it's going to be really cute and I have enough fabric to finish the quilt so no great harm.  Stay tuned to see the completed quilt.