I'm in 15 minutes play!

I finally got my hands on Victoria Findlay Wolfe's new book,

15 Minutes of Play.

and I'm in it and into it.

Here's my Crazy Dresden quilt I made for a swap, right in the centre of this page.

It's machine pieced and quilted, and handbeaded,

made using light scraps and a sunny yellow dresden.

This book is full of lots of ideas to use up your scraps and free up your creativity.

It's working -- I got out some Kaffe prints and tried out Victoria's Lemoyne Star

and managed the Y seams -- although it does take practice.

Here's two blocks using Kaffe for the star.

and some string pieced triangle trees, also inspired by the book.

I was pleased to see four of the group quilts from our 15 minutes play bee

included in the book.

Mine is still a flimsy, but not for long.

Thanks Victoria, for a great book

and for inviting me to be a small part of it.

Back to school books

I decided to celebrate the back to school season with a few new books, purchased at Copperfield Books a local discount/online store that specializes in quilting books. Their website listed Gwen Marston's Liberated Quiltmaking, which lured me to their store, as well as her Classic Four-Block Applique quilts. But they didn't have LQ in stock, so I consoled myself with looking through what was on the shelves.
The Wells gardening/quilt book spoke to me because I found both Gwen and Freddy Moran in it. here's a peeck at Gwen's quilt









and here's Freddy's contributions from the Wells book and the machine quilting book. I can't/don't know how to machine quilt (yet), so I thought some instruction was in order.
Here's a peek at my fungly blocks. I've lost count, but I'm guessing around 110 blocks. I made a second set using those brights from Quilt Pixie pictured in the post below, and then sewed the remaining squares into fungly nine patches. I'm hoping for to make two funglies out of the batch -- one 60 by 80 donation quilt for refugees, and a smaller one from the brights for the local children's hospital.