Turning Twenty

I’ve been working on a simple Turning Twenty quilt. I had a bundle of fat quarters that someone gave me, and it is making a nice mostly floral quilt. I think it’s going to make a sweet baby quilt. I have no one to give it to right now, but that doesn’t worry me, eventually someone we know will have a baby or a grandbaby. Having a gift ready to go is always nice.

If you haven’t ever seen the Turning Twenty quilt, it’s nice. You make identical blocks and then rotate them, and you wind up with a very random and visually interesting quilt. You can also slice them up and put them together in a couple of different ways for variety. A standard T20 block is 16 inches square. This particular one I am doing is the Tiny T20, which is supposed to finish out at 8 inches. Since apparently my cutting and sewing were all over the place and the blocks came out wonky, I cut all my blocks down and they’ll finish at 7.75 inches.

I am going to quilt this myself. I send off my larger quilts to be quilted by a long-arm quilter, but these little things I can do stitching in the ditch.

My friend Sam has been spinning her own yard and knitting things out of it, which I think is totally cool. It does worry me though - where does it end? If she keeps going back in the process, eventually she will own her own flock of sheep and alpaca. Still, her work is beautiful, she posted a picture of her latest shawl on her blog, and I was blown away. It made me consider the unfinished knitting projects I have lurking reproachfully around the house. So I got out a very plain shawl I started last fall and got back on it. It is a Tasha Tudor shawl that is basically a huge triangle of garter stitch, nothing frilly at all. Just a bunch of wooly warmness to wrap myself in next winter. I got about five rows done yesterday and more today. A little at a time and I can whip it out in a month or so.

One of my 2011 goals was to finish a bunch of UFOs (that's Unfinished Objects to you non-knitting, non-quilting people). I am doing well on this. I've finished up two projects completely, moved another two into "completed top" status, and got the top and back that I am doing for my Mom almost done. My goal is to finish Mom's quilt and send it to the long arm shop by next weekend. Then I have a super secret surprise project to work on with some groovy new fabric I got at Cottonseed Glory.

I signed up for MAQ, the Mid Appalachian Quilter's Symposium. I'm taking Italian Tiles on Friday and Beading for Quilters on Saturday. I've been wanting to try beading for a while, so yay!