60 Minutes in an Hour

I sent a card off to my gal pal Paula. It said "I'm bored, therefore I'm boring" I wrote this because I haven't called her in a while, unusual for me. I just felt like nothing has happened lately, it's the doldrums of January. There has been no big finishes of my own work, nothing monumental to tell her about. Yet when I looked at my photos, I guess I have accomplished a bit so far this year.
I made a lot of meals for my freezer. Christmas dinner was away this year, so I cooked a turkey last weekend. It just doesn't seem like Christmas has happened if I don't have the left overs and soup. So I filled my house with the comforting smell of Turkey soup this week.

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I signed up for a 9 patch swap in November. There is a Yahoo group that I belong to and the facilitator, Joyce, does an amazing job on swaps. I've done 30's charms, brown and pink civil war hourglass blocks and now I'm in the 9 patch swap. She made Feb the deadline, thank goodness. Even though these blocks go together quickly, it was nice to take my time and slip in 10 or 15 minutes of piecing at a time. And now they are done. I've made 8 sets of 8, so I shall get 64 blocks back, 32 different combos. We are also swapping the setting squares and corner triangles. Now I can get this project off my cutting table and out of my mind until I get my blocks back in March!

Here is a clipping and pressing tip I picked up from Jo Morton. When you do this, all the "ditches" fall in the same direction. From the front, the dark fabric will always have the ditch away from it. Does that make sense to you? It just gives more options when it comes to quilting.

I've also been picking away at my 30's BOM that got abandoned March 2009. Slowly but surely, blocks are getting completed. Here are a few that I've finished.

I've not sat down and sewed for any length of time since mid December. All this had been accomplished a few minutes at a time. So no big finished, but a lot of progress is being made.

A few minutes here and there adds up to hours of enjoyment!
Stitch a few minutes today,
Sharon