My headline is a quote taken from my 6 year old son.  I can emphasize completely, but as we grow older, we learn to compromise on our desires and our obligations.  He hasn’t mastered this yet, and honestly isn’t really trying either.  But, who can blame him.  Life is short and then you die.  No really, I do parent better than that – but it is a good transition into my post for today!

I came across this blog entry yesterday that captured the essence wonderfully.  Take a read if you have a chance.  It is from a blog called Quilting Daze.  I was either laughing out loud or shaking my head in agreement while I read it.

http://quiltingdaze.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-quilt-police.html

So, this leads me to my activities for today.  I jumped at the chance to get a jelly roll and charm pack of the newest collection from Fig Tree Quilts called AVALON.  It won’t be in stores (and when I say stores, I generally mean The Fat Quarter Shop) until March 2013.  However, I usually find the precuts showing up on eBay well before then.  I didn’t want to just sit on my new treasure too long.  I really, really wanted to do a quick jelly roll quilt and see something produced from these fresh colors immediately.  Some instant gratification!

I looked online and through my patterns at home, and decided on a quilt setting from this book:

Got it at a great price during a Joann sale – 40% off this week!

I picked a flower block that is assembled much like a log cabin block from the book and started cutting and sewing…

Most of these strips are combined with a white/background square on one end and then trimmed corner to corner.  I recently watched a Fons & Porter Love of Quilting episode where they shared tips on stitching these little leftovers and made a little doll blanket out of them.  So I thought I would try to make use of my scrap corners too!

Starting from the top right corner and moving clockwise… I had the strips sewn, trimmed the corners off, kept the fabric together and ran them through the machine, then pressed to the printed fabric and trimmed them down to 1 3/4 ” square.  Notice what my leftovers look like now.  Barely enough threads in that pile to even save for my stuffing bag.

A great tool I used for this was the Fit to be Quarter 2.5 ruler from Open Gate Quilts.  I got it with my purchase of another ruler from their site for the Blogger Girls BOM project.  It worked GREAT for this task.

Here is what I did with my little half square triangle units!

Aren’t they ADORABLE?  They are 3″ square, unfinished.  And I LOVE this fabric – did I say that already?

Here is my initial block, which took a bit of a back seat to my pinwheel project – so I only have one made so far:

These will be set on point and I will use all but 4 strips from my jelly roll and I had all but 1 yard of background fabric in my stash for it already.  I’m using Bella Porcelain solid as the background.

I’ll finish up today with a look at my design wall as of this morning.  I even added a couple more leaves to my AFH tree!

I definitely did what I wanted to do for sure this past weekend.  I hope to continue that this week, because I’m loving my new project.  Also, can’t wait for the next block from the Blogger Girls BOM to be released on Friday!

Have a great week and thanks for stopping by!

Jennifer