yeah!

Yesterday I was sat at the dining room table gritting my teeth cutting out hundreds of little bitty shapes for my Mariner's Compass blocks, when I took a little break and checked out the blogs on my Google reader.
Lo and behold,  Dawn's Blog, Collector With a Needle came by the name of the winner of the  Triangle Giveaway, looked very familiar: me!
If you're not familiar with Dawn's blog have a look, lots of wonderful fabrics and quilts, vintage sewing notions and I've learned quite about about old quilts and patterns from her informative posts.

Thank you for your generosity Dawn!


..and now back to those itty bitty bits....pfft!
listening to some great bands ( U2, Coldplay ) of the Glastonbury Festival is helping to get me through...

to the stars....

As promised I was going to share my new project.  Here's the first block:

After spending time taking courses on learning all sorts of techniques on the sewing machine, and becoming comfortable maintaining and using it, the time came to go back to my quilting roots and sew by hand.  Perhaps a bit ambitious, starting with a Mariner's Compass, but I think this block turned out all ok.

The last time I made such a block was when I took a beginner's quilting class, many moons ago.

I fell in love with the background fabric, and given it's vintage look, went for scrappy, randomly placed rays.  I'll make a few more and see how that pans out....