NaNo...QuiltMo?

Maybe it's the Halloween candy hangover, but flipping the calendar from October to November always has a weight to it that gets to me like no other month.  The weather down here in the South is finally beginning to feel like fall, and it is a lot harder to live in denial about the looming holiday season, what with it being right there on the same page and all.

Don't get me wrong, I adore the holidays - the shopping, the baking, the parties and decorating - but it can be hard to find time to fit it all in.  Which is why all across the nation thousands of people are... setting insanely lofty goals for themselves, haha.

You might be familiar with NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) a challenge to write a 50,000-word novel in one month.  My friends, a writer I am not. Pass.  There is also NaKniSweMo (National Knit a Sweater Month), wherein - you guessed it! - you knit an entire sweater during the month.  This kind of challenge is much more my speed, but I didn't have a sweaters' worth of yarn or a pattern chosen to participate this year.

I do, however, have some fabric for a quilt that I'd like to have done by December.  So I'm striking out on my own this year for NaNoQuiltMo (I'm declaring the No to stand for November).

I'm doing another disappearing 9-patch, but with the more traditional layout this time.  I've since added some pink and green fabric to use for the small squares, to give the top more interest and tie into the backing fabric better.  My goal for this weekend was to get all of the 5" squares cut out, which I just managed:

I'm definitely glad to see the additional color in there.  The goal for this week is to sew them all into the 9-patch blocks, ready to be "disappeared".  We'll see how it's going this time next week!

So.. what crazy goals is everyone else working on this month?

A Quilt for Gracie

Boy, I suck at this blogging thing!  It's only been, what, a year since my last post?  So in the meantime, I've been spinning constantly (of course), knitting a leetle bit, playing with my loom and procrastinating on this quilt.

I told my niece I'd make her a new quilt, because her baby blanket was too worn out to use anymore. Her favorite color is red, and just a couple of weeks after making the offer, Connecting Threads came out with their Rhapsody in Red collection, which was just too perfect!  So I bought several charm packs and then it was just down to choosing a pattern.  I came across the disappearing nine-patch block and thought it seemed like just the thing for a bunch of charm squares, so I started playing around with the layout options in Paint. (that's how most of my projects begin life)

By using the reds in the corner and center, and the white neutral for the sides of the original nine patch, I ended up with four blocks each that had sashing and cornerstones already built in.  Easy peasy!  I rotated them all going the same direction and wound up with a quilt top that looks much more complicated than it actually was.  Oh no, wait - I mean, I'm totally a quilting genius and this was a super finicky pattern ;)

Aaanyway, I finished the top ages ago and just put off and put off working on the quilting.  Finally the guilt started to outweigh the urge to procrastinate (is that a thing?  I don't think that's a thing) so I finished it off with some straight-line quilting and fabulous kitten fabric on the back.  It is on its way to my niece this week!  And now I am addicted to quilting and have already started cutting another.  Finishing a project always does that to me :)