Learning my lessons

It  was a very nice weekend with sunshine and higher temperature, nothing was too bad. Now I woke up to a humid, grey, rainy morning which isn't bad either hence that I forgot to water the petunias.

I went to a machine quilting class with Debby Brown Saturday afternoon and now I'm totally re-charged quilting wise. It was a great class, She was teaching a longarm class which I would like to do eventually. We learned how to pin the quilt back on the leaders, how to center the quilt back, why you need to baste the batting and then the 3 layers together before quilting and all that jazz. This was my second machine quilting class with her and I just can't get enough! We did some quilting which was the best part, we were going to take home the fabric piece we made, but didn't want to bother with it at the end. I just wish I took some pictures of my practice pieces they came out pretty nice. 2 of the ladies I was sharing a machine with have a machine at home so they were pretty good. It was nice to see how other people approach longarm quilting and that I wasn't the least skilled :) I came out of class with lots of design ideas and things to practice, it was a wealth of  information.

I am not allowed to sleep 7 hours anymore. Starving Szundi (translated Sleepy, yes, from the seven dwarfs) is waking me up around 4-5 AM depending on his mood. He needs to be fed immediately and if I don't get up he starts to rub his face against mine, walking up and down on me and if I'm still not getting out of bed he finds my feet and starts rubbing then just simply  biting on my toes. That does the trick and he knows it! :) I spoiled him too much with the bottle feedings and after a year he still remembers. Because of all  this I just had to take a 45 minute nap yesterday afternoon because I felt like I just can not function anymore. I woke up like I was re-born :) And to celebrate that I just dove into my sewing room. 

Still working on my Craftsy BOM and March is next in line with the foundation pieced string blocks. My first time, again. I wish Amy would've said on the video (which I watched 2x before I started) to cut the foundation a 1/4 inch bigger because my square shrunk about an 1/16 inch by the time I was finished. I had to fudge the cutting and sew the squares together accordingly which I managed just fine. I just like to make things a little bigger  and then cut them down to the right  size. Guess it's part of the getting more experience thing. Now I just have to go and take a picture of my masterpiece :)

Here it is, my String Block in all it's glory:

I know it's a little sad that this is all I could come up all weekend, but I'm happy I even had time to make this one block. It might be easy, but it is surely time consuming. You have to cut the strips first, then make the marks, position the fabrics, press every strip one-by-one  as you go, and then finally sew the whole block together. I'm not sure if I wanted to make an easy quilt this would be my block of choice. Just sayin'!

'Til we blog again! :)