Catching Up

I am trying to "catch up"...with my UFOs.  I have caught several  of them and wrestled them to my sewing table to turn into finished projects.  What's the acronym for finished projects by the way?  Are you making any progress catching up with your UFOs?  I'd love to hear your success stories.  I want to finish as many of these projects as I can before I start new projects.  The exception to that rule follows:

I have joined or rejoined two bees that will put me in danger of ignoring my UFOs to work on something else - but I will gladly do that because these bees are very special.  First, I have rejoined the 4x5 Bee (Quarter 1 2012) to add another round of blocks to my Summer Sampler.  I will be a Caretaker of a Hive this round.  That should be interesting!  The concept is that each hive has 5 members and each round lasts for a quarter of the year.  Each member provides a mosaic of "their" colors and favorite blocks.  Then you select a block, make the same block for each member of your hive in their colors.  Mail out by the deadline (which is April 15 2012 for Quarter 1). 

This will be my Summer Sampler.  I asked for aqua, orange with touches of yellow, green, blue - the colors of summer.  A few more rounds and this bad boy will be finished!

The second bee that I have joined is the Pillow Talk Swap Round 7.  I have admired the beautiful work that these gals do in creating a pillow top for their secret swap partner but didn't feel that my pillow making skills were up to snuff.  I have been practicing making pillows and hope that I can bring my A game to this swap.  I have been assigned a partner, selected a block and am working on fabric selection.  I have chosen a rather striking paper pieced block that may be a challenge to put together.  More to come on this subject!

I've also been thinking about some future projects and purchased some fabric for these as yet unstarted projects:

First, a little Aunt Edna by Denyse Schmidt made its way into my sewing room.  I did not purchase the whole collection, just the pieces that caught my eye:

Go figure - they're mostly orange.  My favorite color.  Will I ever grow tired of it?

Doesn't that Kona Mulberry look good with this DS orange print?  As I said, another project is getting started here!

But that was not the end of my fabric shopping.  A package showed up with some Kokka.  I have been wanting some Ruby Star Shining by Melody Miller but had never gotten around to getting me some.  These are my favorites of my purchase:

Some fussy cutting will be going on with these super cool fabrics!  Too bad the color is off in the photo or you could see the wonderful shade of green of the alarm clocks on the left. 

The problem with waiting too long to buy a fabric line is that you can't get it anywhere.  Or you have to pay extra for it (as happend with the typewriter fabric).  Heather Ross fabric comes to mind - those mermaids are really hard to find! 

I have made some other fabric purchases, but I'll save them for another day.  Now I'm off to work.

That's it from the Robertson household.