What's up on Monday

It is a lovely sunny day here on the East Coast , looks and feels like spring ,a little chilly but that is March .  First off I want to say I am sorry to anyone who received an email from me this morning with the word message in the subject line, I did not send that email and my email was hacked so I have since changed my passwords on my both email accounts as well as my facebook account thanks to some advise from Sunny and thanks also to Kaaren for alerting me about this email. Hope this solves this issue and I really think these guys need to get a life .
 So what else have I been up to , well I have not gotten a lot of sewing done  lately , busy with other life matters but I did make a start on my nine patch blocks , want to see , if not close your eyes now .

Oh you are observant , they are not all nine patch blocks are they ,well I will tell you why . I had started making 6"blocks last year with the intention of making the Farmers Wife quilt , I was plodding along quite well for a while then my enthusiasm took a slide in the wrong direction and they got shelved . So..... when it came time to put these nine patch blocks together into a quilt top I was trying to think of how I wanted them arranged to make this a larger quilt and in doing so a little light bulb came on and I decided I would add in the 20 some blocks I had previously made . The nine patch blocks are from an exchange with my Tuesday quilting buddies and are all very colorful as are these sampler blocks so my next thought was a way to blend so many colors and black seemed like a good choice and as they say the rest is history . The top will be 8 across and 9 down so not a bad size and I will add borders eventually but no plans on what that will be just yet , any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I do plan on framing the entire top with black first .
 I have also been making a sampler quilt and wanted it a tad larger so am adding a row to the bottom and have three of the four blocks I need to complete the addition .

 I love cats , don't have one but love them so why not add a real artistocrat Cat , isn't this gal just lovely , that grin is so cute . This was a free stitchery pattern that I googled and I just did the cat in fabric and then  did the embroidery . What to add next , hmmm.. , well I have a box of orphan blocks that I took a look through and there were two bird house blocks both tall and narrow so I measured and sure enough with some slight adjustments they could be made into one block and work perfectly .

There was no grassy area on the original block so I cut the blocks off and added the green area and made one slightly lower than the other , thought it would look better and added the narrow fabric between and voila a great little addition for my country sampler , photos to follow once I get this all sewn together :-)

 I am also working on a little challenge for our quilt guild , our Quilt Show is coming up in June and our president Carol presented us with a challenge , we can make anything we want that has a watering can  somewhere on it , Carol along with being an avid quilter is a wonderful gardener so this is where this challenge arises from . Oh I found the perfect solution to this challenge , I know you are dying to see it but sorry it has to be kept a secret for a while yet . Do you like challenges ? I love them , really I do , I get such a kick out of thinking of something to do for the said challenge and then implementing my idea into fabric is just the best thing ever . I know there are people who shy away from challenges but really you shouldn't as you never know just how creative you can be until you give that a try , it just may surprise you :-)

 I hope you are enjoying a lovely day where ever you are and I thank you for stopping by for a visit .

 hugs Sheila