Catching up and the UFO Challenge.....

  I don't think I ever posted a photo of the strip quilt when I finished it, so here is a photo of it draped on the end of my couch.  I'm looking forward to putting this on our bed when the weather turns cooler.  Too hot right now!  I made 2 pair of pillow cases to go with it.  I call it my "M&M quilt" because it reminds me of a bowl of M&M candies with all those bright colors in it!  (or maybe jelly beans?) And also because it will go on our bed ........we are Mike and Mary...2 M's!

M&M Quilt done

I decided to make a little log cabin quilt....lap size.....out of the left over strips from my M&M quilt.  

I just finished the top except to add a small border.  I think I can put this one together myself and do some stitching in the ditch to quilt it...I hope!  I sure wish I was better at the quilting part of quilting.

**********************

The UFO Challenge

Every quilter has lots of UFO's....admit it!  All those UnFinished Objects sit around in a drawer or bag and never got finished because we got excited about some new project or we got bored with the old one or couldn't figure out what to do next!  Well a local quilt store....The Quilter's Nest....decided to help us take care of this problem by issuing a challenge to register 12 UFO's at their store.  Each month they will draw a number between 1-12 and that is the UFO you are to try to finish in that month.  If you finish it you can bring it for Show-and-Tell on the last Saturday of the month and also be registered for some prizes!  I had no problem finding 12 UFO's to register and so I signed up.

 The number drawn for August was #4 and that was my "butterfly project".  

I think I started these in 2008. 

 I had made these two small butterfly pieces with the idea of doing more and them making them all into a big wall hanging or "something". No real plan in mind.....just wanted to applique butterflies!  Well, after two butterflies and flowers, I put them in the drawer and they had been sitting there ever since.  So what to do with them??????   I decided to make each one into a small wall hanging and will give them to my sisters for Christmas.  I had to add the borders, hand quilt around the butterflies and flowers, and then I machine quilted around the borders and a bit of rambling quilting on the background.  Added the bindings and my first UFO is FINISHED!  Yeah!  

September's UFO.....#11 was drawn.

This was a workshop I took in January 2011 to learn to make the little coffee-filter batik fans that are on this runner.  It was a lot of fun, but I didn't want to make a whole quilt of them!  So I arranged mine into a rather large runner.  Because of the nature of the block, putting them in rows like this makes it asymmetrical in appearance.  To combat that I have decided to add an extra strip of fabric on the two odd ends which makes it symmetrical again, but now it seems "unfinished".  

My plan is to add applique of some sort on the fat parts of the two border ends.  Then I will have to layer, quilt, and bind the whole thing.  OK.....I have a month to do this!  I can do this!

****************

(Not off to a good start.  I spend all morning looking for the fabrics I used to make the fans and found all but the reddish one....which is rather important for what I wanted to do with the applique.  Darn!  I have no batik that matches in color.  Hmmmmmm.....thinking.)

Update next month when the next UFO number is announced and hopefully this is finished.