Busy Week and a Baby Quilt

Its been a busy and fun week filled with birthday's, 3rd wedding anniversary's, two parking tickets (I'm innocent), visits from lovely friends, rescuing rather a lot of ladybugs, cooking a dinner party for more lovely friends (Martha's dessert recipe did not lie this time) and raking the leaves of the entire garden (yard) until you get a blister (ouch!) And today I finally got the chance to sew some more patches made at last weekends Denyse Schmidt's workshop into a bright and breezy baby quilt.

Denyse Schmidt Quilting Workshop

Yesterday Bernie and I took a road trip. We got in the car and drove to Bridgeport, Connecticut to Denyse Schmidt's workshop where we were taking a quilting course organized by Make Workshop. The course was SO much fun I can not begin to explain how liberating, fast and fantastic it was. I gave it a 10 out of 10 - I would gladly (speedily) go back - or perhaps beg Denyse to let me live in her workshop so I can engorge my greedy self on inspiration. You can see how much sewing we did in 5 hours from the little green piece of fabric I used as my thread saver.
Here is the first block of the day .... as soon as I saw it (it was so incredibly not me at all) ... I was proud as punch and immediately decided that it had to be made into a cushion (that's a pillow in the US ... or as we call them in our house "sofa slugs"!)
Today I got to finish the cushion. I bordered the block with bright turquoise and machine quilted the front using the same red cotton that just happened to be on my machine during the quilting class.
My only wonder is if whether I should have quilted across the green patches in the middle ... hum ... but I'm still rather proud of it. It is so bright and springy ... perfect for a garden chair ... sitting in bright green grass on a sunny day (has it stopped being cold yet?) I'll be putting it my Etsy store tomorrow.

The most liberating bit of the class was how we chose the fabric ... or rather the fabric chose us. (It was so hard not to cheat ... I did cheat a little ... sorry.) We had to pull the fabric blindly from big paper bags. I loved the process (despite trying to cheat) - so in my little workroom I now have 3 paper bags on my desk and every time I find or cut a scrap of fabric I am popping it into its size appropriate bag. I can't wait to see what comes out!