Here I am!  Back again after a long break…  Last time I checked in, I was going to put the borders on my son’s newest quilt top… Minecraft Mayhem.

But with this one done, I was eager to move onto a little Christmas in July sewing.  I had this group of items ready to put together:

And got started on it with some pressing, starching and sorting.

I wanted to add in some blues from the Jingle collection to join with the Little Joys fabric bundle.

And since the Jolly Bar was going to take some extra thought and planning and a bit of a scrappy combination – I started with those.  I wouldn’t be able to utilize the fancy Triangle Paper, so I was prepping for the old fashioned method (A squares).  “8” is my substitute for my lost “B” alphabitty.

I was able to get 8 blocks from all of the blue/green colors (6 sets in progress shown here):

I will be putting 4 Little Joys pink blocks in the center (which I finished late last night and they look great!):

I’m really enjoying this new project – but to tell you the truth – there isn’t much wiggle room after you trim down the mountain unit to get the quarter inch allowance.  The FQS tutorial online makes it sound like you will have more to trim, but I find that I don’t.  I also found that my mountain unit can in no way match to the same size as the background “B” piece that gets cut diagonally once.  The FQS tutorial makes it look like they do come out approximately the same size, but they do not.  When Kimberly is pinning them together, she is matching up the two ends.  I have a consistent 1/2 inch difference in length along those long bias ends.  Or I am doing something wrong.

Any who…

I also couldn’t jump at the chance to buy these beauties off eBay last week.  I have no good reason to get them this early because I won’t be doing a project with them anytime soon – but I really wanted to have them in person to touch and see.

Scrap bag of Farmhouse and 2 charm packs each of Farmhouse and Hello Darling:

Well, I must go.  Lunch hour is over… 😦

Jennifer