What happened to October?

Whew - time is truly flying!  Here it is November 2nd and Thanksgiving is right around the corner.  So much has happened since I last blogged:  Hurricane Sandy beating up the East Coast (my heart goes out to all those people who lost so much because of Sandy); and work and Halloween and a really great workshop with Sherri Lynne Woods last weekend and sewing deadlines. And I purchased a mouse and a keyboard for my new laptop so that I can type without so many typos and jumping around when I didn't even want to move from where I was - now that's progress!

Is your life on fast forward too? 

Well, I'm going to take a break from speeding through life and show you a few bits I've been working on.

First, a little background re. the Creative Curves workshop.  Sherri held the workshop at St. Gregory's Church in San Francisco - what an amazing space!

I believe we had 14 people in attendance and I can tell you it was a dedicated group of sewists from 3 different guilds at that workshop.  BAMQG had 7 in attendance.  After a centering exercise, Sherri had us select our fabrics.  I must have been very calm and centered because I went with neutrals - not my usual style!  I only got this far and did not even begin to sew the parts together:

I hope that I will not let this project languish and find the time to sew the remaining pieces and get er done!  This is not an easy technique and really does require a lot of curved piecing.  I think the biggest lesson related to this technique for me is the lack of predictibility - you can't compose the whole picture and then put it together (control, lots of control!).  Every time you sew a segment, you may or will change the composition (loss of control, loss of control!).  It was fun and I hope I will get a chance to take another workshop from Sherri in the future.

Then, back at home on Sunday, I knew that I needed to get my Pillow Talk Swap 9 pillow kicked into high gear.  I had decided to make a New York Beauty block for the pillow.  My partner mentioned that she liked Chicopee and text fabric and scrappy, so I got started.

I posted two photos for feedback and my partner said she liked them both - makes sense for someone who likes scrappy.

I got started and things went sort of like this:

I knew that I wanted to add a border to the block and I got stuck here for awhile, going back and forth between a black border, a white border and a Chicopee border.  Chicopee won and I moved on to this:

Now I'm working on the back, which is going to be pieced.  I'll show you what I did next time (o.k. you're right - I can't show it to you now because it's not done yet...but I did make my template for the block, dry fitted it to the NYB block and I'm ready to start sewing again!) 

This is my first attempt at a NYB block. It's not perfect, but I think it will look really nice when it is all finished and quilted. I'll show you the finished pillow before I sent it out. It will be 20"x20".

And because I cannot resist sharing my grandkids with you, here's a slightly fuzzy picture of the Super Heroes before they went trick or treating.  At 3 and 5, this was their first year to go house to house together.  Talk about excitement - they were lit up with LED lights in their costumes, had their Halloween bags in hand, knew that they were to say Trick or Treat and then Thank You to each person who gave them candy.  Thank goodness there are still neighborhoods where the kids can safely go Trick or Treating!

Aaaanyway, that's it from the Robertson household.