When in doubt, skinny strip

Well another month and another bee block and a coaster - that's all I have to offer.  Not much, is it?  I could show you a photo of my first ever attempts at Free Motion Quilting but you'd fall off your chair laughing and I don't want any injuries arising from someone reading this blog.  I let my kids have a go too at the FMQ and they were way better than me which is weird because I've been sewing for 30 odd years and they haven't even been sewing at all.  They even came up with new designs I hadn't seen before.  Maybe I should submit them to Leah Day and she'd think I was some kind of FMQ genius - mmm - maybe not.

So all I can show you is one sad little bee block (oh and one sad little coaster - not even a set of coasters).  Actually, it's not so much sad as stiff as a board.  Viv, whose month it is, sent us linen and warned us to starch starch starch so I was sewing with some kind of reinforced cardboard - I hope it washes out OK also because of the smell - phooey.  Anyway, here it is and, as almost always, I've ended up doing skinny strips because I think they're pretty.  I was aiming for a kind of map of the states block but with skinny strips.

And here is the coaster.  Now this is a plan of Ayumi's where a gang of super-cool quilters and me are all making coasters which spell out "We love Suzuko Koseki!" and Ayumi is going to hand these to the lady herself at the Tokyo quilt show and we are hoping the lady will gasp in delight and love us all forever although I do think there must be a slight risk that she gives Ayumi that look that famous people reserve for fans - a kind of an anxious smile.  We've all seen it in the pictures everyone bandies about on the internet of them standing next to Kaffe Fassett - they're smiling like a loon and he's looking either slightly anxious or slightly baffled or just a bit bored.  Anyway, I wasn't part of the cool hang because I don't have a cool stash of cool Suzuko Koseki fabrics like the others do so the exclamation mark was only added as an afterthought and my coaster is only really an afterthought to the whole project but, since Ayumi asked so nicely and since I can't resist trying to be in with the in crowd, I agreed and made a union jack as that is one thing I have made twenty trillion times before and can make upside down and backwards with my hands tied behind my back in my sleep.  So here are the front and back of my coaster (and credit should be given here to Kerry's new single binding tutorial which will revolutionise the way you bind small items like coasters).

OK I am now going to return to my sewing room and get back to the real job of free motion quilting a whole quilt - yup my first FMQ on an actual quilt.  Up until now I was too scared to try in case I messed up the quilts I was making so I just wimped out and stuck to straight lines.  But now I'm fearless, this one poor quilt has a trillion different types of FMQ on it, every time I turn a corner I try something new.  It's a secret Moda Bake Shop project - I'm not sure exactly how the Moda Bake Shop secrecy rules apply so I don't even know if I was supposed to say that much but there we are, I've blurted it out.  So anyway, if my first ever Moda Bake Shop project comes online at some point in the future and there's a photograph of it way off at the end of a field and you can only see it through binoculars, you'll know why.

Oh and one more thing, if you haven't already applied to join the newest round of the Doll Quilt Swap, applications close soon (10th I think) so get your form submitted.