A New Jen Kidwell Block and a Fixed Old Block

Hello! Last night I stitched up a pieced flower block from the Green Tea and Sweet Beans quilt. As you can see, it has a lot of pieces so I made vinyl pattern pieces. Afterwards it occurred to me that it might have been easier to applique it. 

It was fun to make but there's only one of these blocks in the entire quilt so it's on to something else. The Green Tea and Sweet Beans quilt pattern is by Jen Kingwell who is from Australia. It costs a fortune to get her patterns shipped over here or I would sell them in the shop. Here is what the quilt looks like:

See, you can hardly pick out the little block I did last night. Jen has a quilt called Steam Punk that I'm going to do at some point. The blocks are all the same and I found a lady in Australia that makes acrylic templates for the block. She even engraves your name on the templates so that you can keep track of the templates if you go to a class or quilt outing. Here's the Steam Punk quilt:

Jen uses a lot of gray and black and white in her quilts. I wish I had a close up of the Steam Punk block. I think it will be an easy and fun quilt to do, especially with the templates. I tried to get enough interest in Jen's patterns to get people to pre-order so that I could afford to get them in the shop but not one person was interested. That made me wonder about my taste in quilts...lol. Oh well, my kids will have some weird quilts to sell at the big garage sale they have when I go to the big sewing room in the sky....

I also fixed the mistake I made in the last block of the Virtual Quilting Bee quilt. I just couldn't stand looking at it. Here's the before:

and here's the after. It just kept stomping its little quilty foot and so I took it apart and fixed it.

And there you have it. The most exciting part of my day...my little sewing time. It's so therapeutic. I really do know that, at some point, I'm going to have to try to finish some of the tops I have piling up. I wish I had the money to, like some quilters, send them off to be quilted. But then I'd be relinquishing control of how they look. What do you think of Jen Kidwell's work? Don't you just love it? Well, I need to go work on my "real job". Today I'm writing about baby sale items and makeup and about property management. Should be an exciting day....sigh. I'm grateful to have a job. Really. Cheery wave from Bev