Friendship Everlasting

I really can't believe that it's already October, but I'm glad. My birthday was over a month ago and I am barely putting away the pile of fabrics I purchased on the birthday trip.
I hadn't been sewing much, so the studio was slightly neglected.

I scored some nice Robert Kaufman prints on sale at my favorite fabric mecca, M & L Fabrics in Anaheim, the cows, chairs, and citrus prints. I'm still not so in the groove of paying attention to what is what when I buy fabric. I have designer prints all over in my stash and I only become aware of them when I pull them for projects. A lot of them are older designers and collections from when my grandma was building her stash, but as I become more and more obsessed with the idea of designing fabric and incorporate my love of blog surfing, I've found that I am becoming more familiar with fabric designers and collection names as well as companies. It's exciting to start memorizing the details. 

Of course I purchased all that fabric (15 yards approx.) I had not a single project in mind but rather colors that I'm lower on in my stash. (There's an addiction for ya!) Orange. It's still a mysterious one for me. I enjoy it. It's uplifting and positive, but I can't manage to find prints I like. Not to mention that I don't really use it often. So, I have something orange brewing in my mind, October is helping.

What also helped was the special visit from my BFF for the last 23 years! She drove down from the Bay area for a weekend of sewing and girl talk. When she arrive with her machine in tote, I was blown away to discover she'd never made any patchwork blocks/traditional quilts before. (Art quilts, yes!) So we set to making friendship wall hangings. 

I've had flying geese on the brain so we started with those. I tested out a method I'd found on the Connecting Threads website. The tutorial was excellent, easy to follow and makes four units at once!

We made dozens, then decided that we needed a central block. I knew of an easy one, Saw Toothed Star. She and I each made a center block, and traded. We had tons of fun mixing the Flying Geese we made into a nice boarder. Not too bad for our first time (I hadn't made Flying Geese before either).

We picked out a special egg print on black originally from my grandmas stash for the backing and decided we'd each quilt them up this week. It was an exceptional weekend! She is such a dear friend, I'm so happy she was able to sneak back down to our hometown for a sewing retreat!

It definitely helped me harness my sewing mojo again. I spent the following two days after she left cutting and sewing 64 more Flying Geese units to make a plaid version that I've been gawking over.

And after getting my friendship quilt (that we lovingly named the 'A''A' Quilt for our initials and the amount of beer consumed that weekend) basted, I decided that I'd hand quilt it, since I need some practice with that as well. 

Here we are with our projects!