Redwork and Mail...

First of all, I received this in the mail today from my sweet friend Amanda.

Amanda and I have been friends for around 10 years now and I am honored to have won this bag from her. I have seen her grow and develop as a quilter from those first days when she was expecting her oldest child and made her first quilt, to the talented quilt artist that she has become. I am so blessed to have such a dear friend. This bag is a work of art and I will cherish it! I love the colors in it, something about it reminds me of chocolate covered cherries, or those chocolate truffles with the pink cream centers. You know the ones I am talking about?

Amanda is doing a quilt-a-long on her blog (see left hand side bar for a link). I joined hesitantly because I don't really feel like I have much of a stash to draw from. Most of my fabrics are ok on their own, but don't really go with much of anything else in my stash. SOOO I went and bought these.

I had been thinking about doing a redwork quilt because I had a set of these that I bought several years ago and never embroidered up.

I decided to do them as redwork embroidery. So, in a way I AM using something I already had on hand. I hope to combine the two sets of blocks into a quilt top when I get them all done. I'll have 12 of each, so I should have a good sized quilt when I am done. I am really trying to break out of that "I can only do a lap size" mentality. LOL We will see how it goes...

And just a quick word of thanks to Sew Mama Sew, they again linked to the kids clothes tutorials again yesterday in their "handmade for the holidays" series. They have been linking lots of fun tutorials for all sorts of things this month.