Designing Monday

Last Tuesday, the local quilt guild meeting topic was a Chinese Auction.  I don;t know exactly what that means or why it was Chinese, but the gist of it was everyone brought in new or gently used items from their sewing rooms that they no longer wanted.  Then the items were laid out on tables.  Each member was given 20 tickets and we walked around the tables and put our tickets in the containers for the items that we wanted.  I only bid on about 6 items.  There were probably 60 - 70 items.  Then the person leading the auction starting pulling one ticket from each container to determine the winner for each item.

The item with the most tickets was this item

 and guess who the winner was???  I could't wait until I got home to open it up, so I ripped it open at the meeting and started checking it out.  Here's what was inside:

Saturday morning I started cutting the first block

 and before I knew it I had it all sewn together.

So then while I watched the Saturday morning quilting shows on PBS, I cut all the pieces for the first 10 blocks.  Then I managed to get the next 6 sewn on Sat. and Sun. and here they are:

Each kit comes with 2 WOF strips that are 2.75".  I normally oversize two squares to make my HST's so this was a challenge for me.   So I finally pulled out my Easy Angle ruler that I bought several years ago and put it to work.  I definitely like this method and will use it again.  I still find that I am trimming to get my HST's square, but there is much less waste.  Occasionally I get them cut and sewn right on the money and there is only the little dog ear to chop off.  But that seems to be mostly luck!!

 So what's on your design wall today?  Hop on over to Judy's to see more beautiful designs.