May block beginnings

Just wanted to show my May block as it looks when first pieced. In looking at some of my finished blocks for this CQ, I realized that I love the look of some lace on the blocks, so I'm planning on adding a bit of lace, perhaps on the seam of the gold fabric in the lower left corner.

This block is going to represent the trip Mike and I chaperoned in 2010, with high-schoolers from his school. We went to Italy and Greece. You can see the little black dots in the white center patch. Those are little guides for my beading; I'm going to use gold beads to make a little Parthenon.

Happy stitching!

April block...a bit late

So life is always crazy at the end of the school year. This year the "end" of the school year was a longer time than usual, partly because of our trip to Europe over Spring Break. Now that I'm in my 40's, it seems to take me longer to recover from those trips.

So here, at last, is my April block for CQJP! This is the before photo. In the center portion, I printed out the words to a song that was sung at our wedding onto Extravorganza, which I layered over a piece of white satin. Maybe I'm being hyper-cautious, but I've blurred out the words, just in case there's a copyright issue! The song is called "I will be Here" by Steven Curtis Chapman. If you want to read the lyrics, they are over here at the K-Love site.

When I stitched the block, I modeled it after a block in one of my favorite antique crazy quilts. You guessed it: Maria Wilson Beardsley's CQ on pages 92 - 93 of Penny McMorris' book, Crazy Quilts. In Maria's quilt, the block is located in the lower right corner.

Here is the finished 6-inch block. Since the song lyrics take up so much of the space, there wasn't room for a whole lot of embellishing. I did a bit of embroidery, beading, and sequins at the two seams, then I made a button and bead cluster in the lower right.

From a CQ standpoint, it's not my favorite block for this quilt, but I love the song so much that it makes up for that :)

Now I need to go work on my May block!

Happy stitching!!!

Block 2 update

The end of the school year is always a busy time around here, since Mike and I are both teachers. Then two days after school got out, we left for a road trip out west to visit Mt. Rushmore, Badlands, Devil's Tower, Yellowstone, and Grand Tetons. It was a fun but busy trip! When we returned home, I added some beads to block 2 of my anniversary CQ, to show the new states Mike and I visited together: South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. I'm still working on other blocks for CQJP 2012, slowly but surely :)