A little help from my friends

Hi folks!  How is everyone this week?  If you're like me, you are busy, busy, busy.  Why is it that there always seems to be a ton more work to be done when you get to be at home instead of at work?  I guess that housework expands when it knows you have time to pay attention to it.  Otherwise, I can't explain where all this dirt came from.

This week I mainly worked on the house and on my paper for the conference next week, but I also squeezed in some time to work on blocks for a block swap I'm participating in with some friends.  Here are my blocks for this month:

Well, they're kind of blowing around there, but they look okay.  Every month our fearless leader gives us colors to use for the different parts of the block, then we send them to her and she swaps them.  It's been a good experience.  Here are some of the blocks I've gotten in return:

A lot of variety there! That's the great part about swaps--seeing everyone else's fabric choices and interpretations of the block.  We only have one month to go and then I'll have a Christmas quilt to show off!

If you're interested, we're using this pattern, which is free: Santa's Rising Sun Quilt. You should know that these babies turn out great, but they take forever to put together.  At least they do for me.  Maybe I'm extra slow, but read the pattern and see what you think.

Now that that swap is winding down, I joined another one with my quilt group. Yeah, I know, nothing like obligations.  But these are friendship stars, with very few rules, and no month to month color requirements. There were several groups, like scrappy, batik, Christmas, etc.  For some reason, I chose solids.  What is it about solids that is drawing me in lately? Here is my first batch:

It was sunny and difficult to get a good picture of the pinks, so I tried to be artsy and put them on the grass in the shade. Well. The corner triangles are really a yellow green, which don't show up so well, but you get the idea!  One thing I discovered while making these (which was MUCH faster than the Santa blocks) was that the solids will show if you are even one thread off on the corners or the matching, which wasn't much problem but made me nervous.

That was my sewing week!  Hope you got a lot more done than I did! Everyone enjoy the weekend.  Stay away from the housework--like I said, it expands. Best to be safe and stay out of the way!

Linking to Confessions of a Fabric Addict and also Finish it up Friday. Come on over and have a look!