Just Takes Two

My mom and I have been talking about the idea of doing a quilt along together----you know, same pattern, each person doing their own quilt type thing----for awhile. I have also wanted to do a sampler quilt for a long, long time.
So, when my mom told me about the Just Takes Two sampler quilt, I jumped on board without even taking a peek at the quilt. I choose my fabrics and mom gave me the patterns needed for the first 6 blocks.
It wasn't until quite a while later that I found out just what this quilt entails. There are SO MANY blocks and I got a little overwhelmed.
Especially after I made the first block, which required a little bit of hand applique and I discovered I HATE doing hand applique. It came as a surprise....I love quilting and crochet and embroidery, how could I NOT like hand applique???? But, I found it tedious and annoying.
So, I was even more worried that my mom had bought me a ton of fabric for nothing.
I resolved to figure out how to get it all done because I love the colors and the quilt itself and I knew I'd learn a lot. But all those applique blocks had me worried...
Enter the In Your Words blog hop and as my vision for my project evolved, I decided to use some of the fabric from my Just Takes Two quilt. The original idea was to have a wall-hanging that would match the quilt I would *some day* finish, a little incentive to want to finish the quilt. (ended up making it a pillow which will someday sit on top of the quilt on my bed!!!)
And then, I decided to do some fusible applique on the project and I discovered how easy fusing makes applique! Even if I had hand-stitched around the flowers (which I did not do, I machine-stitched), it would have been fine.
So, I have new incentive to do my quilt! I worked on it the other day, when I had a Craft Day that sadly no one came to, getting 3 blocks finished before I stopped to make dinner and burned my hand and couldn't keep piecing that night...but I am excited to keep working on it and the applique blocks no longer intimidate me!
Here's the blocks I have done so far, the three from last night and the two I had finished awhile ago:

Second Craft Day

I had another Craft Day today and boy was it fun! There was a better turn out this time----4 including me. This Craft Day centered around embellishing shoes and making yarn pom-poms!! My shoes still have a ways to go----I need to let the glue holding the glitter dry and I'm giving it about 24 or so hours....then I'll finish them.

Can you see Liam? He's begun an embroidery project....I'll have to post about it later. He's super excited about it and has been working on it ALL DAY!

While getting ready and cleaning for the day, Heidi found a fun place to play with my phone (I love how proud of herself she is!):

There will definitely be more Craft Days! I wish I had started doing these years ago!

Craft Day

I have been wanting to schedule a Craft Day forever. I finally got one scheduled and today was the day. Sadly only Jessie was able to come, but I had so much fun that I am planning to do more---every two weeks or every month or so.
We did a couple of paper crafts using my plethora of scrap-booking materials and it really was fun. Here are all of our finished projects:

Here's my first. It's a house number door plate for our front door. Before was just boring old number stickers on the door. I like this much better (hearts are for privacy):

And this is Jessie's first craft, a poster for Allan (star bursts are for privacy):

For our next craft, we did the same thing, a flower petal craft based on this web site post. It was so much fun, I want to do another......Jon even wants to make one!!!! I want to try it with fabric too.....

PS...a huge thank you to my husband for letting me use his Iphone to take the pictures of my crafts. I have not been able to locate my missing camera charger yet...boo hoo. And thank you to Jessie for taking pictures of hers.