Rolling right along

It has really been a busy spring so far!  I'm really glad I retired when I did.  I don't know how I would have been able to do everything this spring if I was still working full time.  After my last post, I finished the Pinwheel Fancy quilt (more about that later) that was an add-on Scrap Addicts project, then started cutting blocks for the raffle quilt.  I knew that I would be away from home for a couple weeks and I wanted to be able to work on it while I was away. I hit upon a way to keep all the pieces for each block organized so that I could work on them without getting them mixed up - little zipper sandwich bags!

My hubby and I were away at the Knights State Convention from Thursday thru Sunday.  On that Saturday, I got up and drove 2 1/2 hours to my niece's baby shower, then turned around and drove back to the convention.  When I got home on Sunday, I threw some things in the washer and packed.
Then I drove about 5 hours to my sister's house.  She needed to have a hip replaced, and so I went down to help her.  (Tangent alert!)  Am I the only one who considers North to be 'up' and South to be 'down'?  As in 'We drove up to New York for the weekend' or "We drove down to Florida and saw the Everglades'?  Anyway, back to the topic at hand!

I got back this past Thursday, unpacked the suitcase and started packing again.  We're heading (up ;->) to New Haven for the week for my husband's job.   The day after we get back, I need to be in Pittsburgh at 11 a.m for rehearsal.  The Concert Chorale that I sing with is going to be performing at the Three Rivers Arts Festival at noon that day!  They even have us on the website!

http://www.3riversartsfest.org/fest_event/pittsburgh-concert-chorale-2/


I was in a quandary about my Pinwheel Fancy quilt because another Scrap Addict was using a similar color scheme as my original idea.  After much agonizing, I decided to go in a completely different direction.  I still used black as my accent triangles, but I used various brights in the large triangles.  Then I made a variation on the block and expanded it to make a center medallion.  The small pinwheel blocks became a pieced border around the center medallion, set off with two narrow black borders.  Some little kid is going to absolutely adore this one!  I sent a picture to my Quiltmaker contact, and she says that in addition to the video shoot in August, she is planning to feature it in a blog post!  Yay!  I'm seriously thinking about writing up the pattern and publishing it. I'll probably make one change to the piecing; other than that, I'm very happy with the way it turned out. I can't post the picture until after it has appeared on the blog, but once the blog post is up, I will link it here and on Facebook.