A promising start to the holidays

School term finished on Friday... so it's holidays for me and the kids for the next two weeks.  I will need to sneak in some work time, and the kids have a few plans, but I'm hoping to get lots of sewing done too.

The last week has been very wet and wintery, but I have been plugging away at my "designated task", adding sashing to my VQR blocks, and adding the framing to the My Tweets blocks.  It is always funny that projects that started like... 5 or so years apart are coming together at the same time.

My Tweets now has blocks added to the left, top and right of the central applique panel.  Just the bottom row to frame and add on now.

VQR has sashing added to half the quilt, and those rows have been sewn together.  Woot.  This means I can have half my floor back to plan other tasks (I feel like I should insert an evil laugh here...)

Finally my Craftsy purchase arrived.  Oh, did I tell you I ordered a kit through Craftsy?  It was something I really liked, but at full price + international postage was too expensive to justify.  Luckily it came up on a great special, so I figured, why not?

A layer cake, green yardage and white yardage.  It doesn't look overly exciting so far...

And the printout of the pattern in black and white doesn't look particularly exciting either... but I think it is a cool pattern, and I can't wait to break it all open (maybe on the open bit of floor).

While the design wall is looking free as well, I have moved the floral applique block into the central space.  Still waiting for that inspiration but I have a few ideas.  Need to play with size and fabric limitations.  It looks a bit lonely by itself. 

I've found some free patterns from my internet browsing activities over the last few weeks.  I really like the softness of this pattern, and could imagine it from many of the leftover groupings of fabrics from other projects.

Esther Aliu has many wonderful BOM patterns, and this is one of her current free patterns.

I am also being drawn to a Trip Around the World quiltalong at https://myteaandbrie.com/blog.  I have never really been keen on this pattern, it can be a little full on when all the diagonal stripes are different coloured fabrics, but I have decided to have a few stripes being plain, and a couple of low volume stripes, and the other ones are... FLORALS!  Yes, I have changed my mind from the Granny Square quilt (really because even though I can see those fabrics in the GS pattern, I just had too many fabrics I wanted to use).  So I am going to try out one TATW block, and see how it goes.

She has very comprehensive instructions for completing the blocks, tips and tricks, as well as a great table showing how many blocks and fabric you need for different sizes.  If you've been thinking that this is a quilt you might like to make, I seriously recommend the quiltalong, whether you stick to the timelines or not.