Little bits

Hello friends! We are having a dark, wet, and gloomy time around here, so I hope it's warm and sunny where you are. It is October and this is what we expect about now, but that doesn't make it any easier. On a related note, does anyone besides me miss the smell of burning leaves? I know it's air pollution, but that smell really means autumn to me.

Well, since I finished Burgoyne Surrounded last week (which is now at the quilter--yay me!) I thought I would stick to some small projects this week. I know I still have the Ocean Waves quilt to finish (and not far to go on it, either), but I am just not up for working on a big quilt right now. I just don't have the mental energy. Plus I want some immediate gratification!

While I was mucking out the sewing room this weekend--which was a disaster, let me tell you--I found these snowflake blocks:

Someone gave me these a while ago. (I mean years ago. True story.)  They are well-made, but as you can probably see, they were sewn with white thread. Take a look at the close-up:

Yep, you can see the white thread showing through the seams.  It's pretty distracting. These are constructed on a 9-patch grid, and I think I can just rip the main seams and restitch them with a dark gray thread and call it good. I don't want to put a lot into this, but I still think I can make them look a little better and use them in a winter table topper or something. I forgot to measure them, but I think they're 9 inches finished.

I also started on one of the paper pieced projects I showed before:

This is the Halloween one. Did you know that some patterns that are printed in the magazines are also available in easily printable form on their websites? I never really paid attention to those little notices in the magazine, but lo and behold--there they were! No tracing! Just download and print. It was great. And you can see that I couldn't stand to use gray so I used this star/sky print instead. I like it. This uses big pieces, so I hope to finish it this week.

I also decided that I'm going to give Vicki Welsh's "Cross the Drunkard's Path" quilt along a go. It goes until the end of the year, so I have a shot at finishing something by then. I have these to use:

I've had these templates forever, so now I'm finally going to put them to use. They make 4-inch finished blocks. And I always seem to get carried away with these things, so I'm limiting myself only to the fabric I have here. There is almost a yard of the floral fabric, all leftover from a backing for a previous quilt, so it's in pieces. There's also about a yard of the green, which is not a Kona but an Art Gallery fabric which has a great hand. I think I can make a fairly small quilt and enjoy the process during a high-pressure time for me here near the end of the year.

That's enough for now, don't you think? Also, I did see that Bonnie Hunter has released the colors for this year's mystery at her blog. It's in brights. Oh, the temptation! I suspect I know what I'll be doing in January!

Linking to Linky Tuesday, Fabric Tuesday, WIP Wednesday, and Let's Bee Social. Hope everyone has some happy projects to work on this week!