Joining the Craftsy BoM

So last year I signed up to a BoM for a fabulous quilt, but after the second month kind of lost motivation. It was gorgeous but just too much hand sewing for me! (Note: I joined when I had only been sewing for a few months and really had no idea what I liked or didn't like. I just thought it looked cute!).

Fast forward to the beginning of this year and I start seeing mention of the Craftsy BoM popping up all over the place. I ummed and ahhed and thought yeah that could be fun but really, do I have the staying power for a.whole.year?!


Then some of the fabulous girls on QCA mentioned they were interested and all of a sudden we have a support group! ;) It's great - we can share our blocks as we make them and keep ourselves and each other motivated to continue. So I'm determined to get past the second month this time. I even bought a special fabric bundle just for this quilt.

This is Moroccan Mirage by Khristian A Howell. It's absolutely not my normal style of fabric but oh I love love love it! I bought this bundle from the Intrepid Thread and it was 30% off. Bargain! I can't recommend the Intrepid Thread highly enough. Fabulous customer service and really fast postage. It normally takes nearly two weeks to receive things I've ordered from the States. This bundle took 8 days. I was very surprised when the postie dropped it off!

So I have already made my January blocks. So I kind of cheated and didn't actually watch the BoM video - because my computer died and it was too hard to get it sorted on the iPod. I just used the instructions provided and they were great!

Asterisk block. Easy peasy and so much fun. I took a ridiculous amount of delight in the fact the white strips lined up with very little effort from me. Plus I'm loving that fabric. Did I mention that already?

Wonky slashed block. Now this one wasn't so easy peasy. I think I unpicked seams 3 or 4 times to get those red stripes to line up just right. They are still a fraction off but nothing compared to what they were originally. Where did I go wrong? Oh yeah, I probably should have watched the video...

So now I have packed away the rest of that gorgeous fabric to await the February blocks. I think if I leave it in plain sight I may be tempted to use it for some other project! Out of sight, out of mind and all that.

Oh and I'm planning the end result to be a picnic blanket. My mum was -horrified- that I was going to use a quilt as a picnic blanket! But why not? It might encourage me to do more picnic trips with the kids!

(Apologies for terrible ipod photos in this post - these were taken when the computer carked it and I couldn't upload photos from my regular camera. Plus I'm incredibly lazy when it comes to uploading the photos so I couldn't be bothered retaking them!).