Today I finished 6 additional cross blocks for my friend's charity quilt. The photo shows all of the blocks from yesterday and today.

Today I worked on sewing six cross blocks for a friend's charity quilt. The blocks are supposed to have red or red-patterned fabric as the background of multi-color crosses. These were fun to put together and I hope to sew 6 more blocks tomorrow.

I haven't been able to post for the past week as we were away on vacation, but I have continued sewing the small hexagon patchwork project started earlier in February. Hopefully this will become part of a quilted tea cozy in the next two weeks!

Today's thing was making chardonnay wine jello for a dinner party at my parents house. It turned out sweet and yummy. I used this recipe by Chef Michael Smith for Chewy Wine Shots: http://www.foodnetwork.ca/recipes/recipe.html?dishid=6872

Today I worked more on the endless sewing of tiny hexagons and helped my hubby and son with the building of a giant Lego Creator tractor trailer. I was the piece jockey, digging through the pile to find individual pieces as fast as possible as they constructed the truck from the pages and pages of instructions.

(download)

Click here to download:

day-5-sewing-lego-truck-vtInvHnAjCbhdbgvrdFG.zip (446 KB)

I worked on sewing two more hexagon flowers today. This project is slow going with the tiny stitching and is testing my patience for hand-sewing. My goal is to finish several more flowers and then stitch them all together into a patchwork tea cozy.

Today I used some of the basted hexagons to sew a hexagon flower. I hope to make several more of these flower over the next few days and piece them together. It's not obvious in the photo, but the size of each hexagon is about an inch wide.

Today I sewed white fabric strips around the edges of 4 completed scrap blocks. I was originally thinking about making a full size quilt with more of these blocks, but decided to make a mini-quilt so that it might actually get finished. The colorful scraps in these blocks are all vintage fabrics from my awesome online quilting friend J. Most of these fabrics date from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. I love looking at all of the different designs!

My original plan for the 2011 thing-a-day was to work on some unfinished sewing projects and possibly get a couple things done. However, I'm going to be away from my sewing machine for the first two weeks of February. So instead, I'm going to work on some new hand-sewing projects. My first project is something I've wanted to try for a long time - paper-pieced hexagons. I hope to use them to make a patchwork tea cozy.

With the help of my 4 year old, I used a die-cutter to punch out lots of small fabric hexagons. Then I cut out even smaller paper hexagons from custom-sized graph paper downloaded from www.incompetech.com. Next, I'm basting down the edges of the hexagons to the small pieces of paper with red thread. This will make it easier to hand sew them together as patchwork. The basting thread and the paper will eventually be removed after all of the hexagons are hand-stitched together at the edges.

Today I continued working on the baby quilt blocks, and sewed colored borders on each of the squares.