Phew, 1st December already!  Where exactly has the time flown to?!  Anyway, being the 1st of the month, that means it’s a Fresh Sewing Day over at Lily’s Quilts, so here’s a round-up of my last month’s work…

Hmm, it seemed like I’d done more than this, oh well!  I did man stalls at 2 fairs, and did plenty of stocking up of supplies, so it’s not TOO bad I suppose :o)

Fresh Sewing Day

So after a trip to the doc’s (to get signed off for a week with an upper respiratory tract infection :o/) it was rather nice to be able to pick up a couple of fab parcels at the sorting office.  First up was my wall hanging from the Sew Happy Geek Table Runner And Wall Hanging Swap from the lovely Karen.  I admired this from the moment it was posted, however I got totally thrown by someone saying it was obviously a round table runner!  It is, of course, a lovely round wall hanging (which totally appeals to my off-the-wall side) and I love the rainbow of colours.  At the moment it will have to take up temporary residence on the living room door until I do my post-Christmas furniture reshuffle (I’m planning on getting more storage) but once my wall real-estate is sorted, I will find it a permanent home to display its full glory.

I was also lucky enough to get these gorgeous scraps in my parcel, aren’t they beautiful?  I can see much drooling and stroking in my future!

My second parcel was from M Is For Make, who was having a great Cyber Monday sale, where I picked up some Echino fabric for my friend’s bag, and a couple of other pieces of Echino, plus a fat 16th bundle of Echo by Lotta Jansdotter.  I have loved seeing the Echo line, but wasn’t sure how much I would really like it, and this was a nice, cheap way to find out, with decent enough sized pieces to make some things (you’ll have to trust me the whole line is there, I just wasn’t feeling co-ordinated enough to fan it out!)

Here is the Echino for the bag, along with the contrast black I chose for the outer, and the dotty fabric for the lining.  The photos of the bag in Amy Butler’s book has a large feature button on it, and this button I found seemed perfect (sorry the detail isn’t too clear, but it’s a flower pattern in black on purple)

Are you still with me?  Really?  Okay, we the last thing I have to tell you about today is a new swap that will be starting up in January for Japanese x and + blocks.  This will be a ‘contribute from your own stash’ block swap, where you make blocks in multiples of 5 (that is you can sign up to make 5, 10, 15 etc) and receive a pile of blocks back.

This is what they look like (photo via Amy at Badskirt):

Aren’t these fun?  Amy also has a fab tutorial on her blog for how to make one:

So are you in?  The swap will start on the 7th January, with blocks posting by 18th February (so LOADS of time)  It’s open internationally, so you could end up with a quilt with blocks from every corner of the earth.

Okay, I’m done now, have a great day all!