Breaking Radio Silence...

It's been quiet around these parts lately because my life has been the complete opposite. It's 11 sleeps until my trip and I have a LOT to get done before I leave. Couple that with injuring my knee ice skating two weeks ago (thankfully just a really bad bruise) and not much sewing has been happening. Also the knee injury prevented me from going to the craft and quilt fair, which was very upsetting. Thankfully I have the quilt show in Birmingham in two weeks to look forward to.

There has been some progress on my genome quilt- I've started sewing the HST's together into 5x5 blocks, which I'll then sew together to make the whole quilt top. I'm doing it that way because hopefully sewing blocks together like that will keep the whole thing more square. Sewing them together is slow work though; cutting off the little 'dog ears' from the corners, making sure they're all in the right orientations and pressing the seams open makes for very slow progress. At the moment I'm averaging a bit under an hour per block. There will be 49 of these blocks and I've done 5 so far... as I said, slow progress.

However, I'm not just breaking radio silence to update you on the slow progress of my genome quilt, I have much more exciting news than that!! Today was the Amitie sale, so I took a little trip out there after work to take a peek (naughty I know since I'm about to go on holiday and plan on lots of fabric shopping while I'm there, but who cares!)

I bought some lovely fabric. Firstly a couple of black and white pieces, as down the track I intend to make a black and white (and maybe red) quilt so I thought I'd get the ones I really liked while I was there.

Secondly, and more exciting, I bought some fabric for my plan of paper pieced hexagons!! Which I'm happy about as I have an almost solid 7 hours to start work on them on Sunday at the MMQG "sit n sew" day.

I've decided to go for a grandmother's flower garden style quilt. These are the fabrics I got and I plan on making flowers and using the purple in the middle in the centre of each flower with the other prints as the petals (with one kind of fabric per flower).

It's very traditional making the hexy flowers from these repro prints I know, but the extensive range of fabrics at Amitie just overwhelmed me a bit and without a set idea of what I wanted these were the only fabrics thar jumped out at me. Not that I'm thinking badly of my decision, I love the fabrics, they are gorgeous colours, and since I'm being traditional with my methods by hand sewing it there's nothing wrong with being traditional with my design too.

So, did anyone else go to amitie today? What did you get? If you are a member of the MMQG I hope to see you on Sunday!