Falling behind!

Okay, so it's been awhile since I posted. I need to try harder to keep up. I have been busy, so at least I have something to say!

I am working on two small quilts based on a pattern by Piece O' Cake Designs that appeared in an issue of American Patchwork and Quilting in Feb. of last year. There were 3 blocks in the design, each repeated three times. I wanted a larger quilt, with 16 blocks, so I designed an additional block, and repeated them each 4 times. With two identical quilts, that makes 32 blocks. Today I fused the flowers to the blocks and I just finished machine appliquing them with a small zigzag stitch. The block in the upper right is my own design. I think it goes with the others pretty well.
They were supposed to be placed on a white background with multicolor polka dots all over it, but I couldn't find any fabric that was even similar, so I used this blue with white stars. I want to try doing these as a quilt-as-you-go project; we'll see how that works out.

DH and I went to the movies Saturday night; we saw Ratatouille, which we loved. We try to see all the Pixar movies, and have many of them on DVD. After we got home, the Disney Channel showed Monsters, Inc. so we watched that as well. Lots of fun!

I am supposed to bring some potato salad to an Eastern Star picnic before tomorrow nights' meeting. I just boiled a couple of eggs; I will pick up a large container of mustard potato salad at the store tomorrow. I will add the chopped eggs and some dill dip to jazz it up. It should turn out great. One never knows--some things I make very well, others don't turn out as I had hoped.

I made 13 Christmas cards this past week from pieces of old cards that I have collected over the years. They turned out pretty nice, a little amateurish, but for my first attempt not too bad. I will try to make some a little nicer next time and maybe I can show some of them. I don't want to show any that might have copyrighted artwork on them, but I believe it is okay to recycle them for my own use as long as I don't try to sell any. I will add labels on the back that state that they are recycled (as if you couldn't tell by looking at them!)

I started using Picasa for my photos; so far I really like it. It is much easier to crop and resize photos on it, and I hope to learn how to do more advanced work with it. I was using PhotoSuite 4 and liked it, but Picasa is a free download and I have heard so much glowing praise for it that I decided to try it out.