Weekend Sew In

I love a weekend that has nothing on the calendar except Saturday night dinner out! I've been taking full advantage to work on my January Sew Alongs and the last items on my January Goals. FNSI with Handmade by Heidi got me off and running Friday night. Hot pink blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge hosted by soscrappy were first up. I've decided to make 6 blocks a month of each color and either add another color in December or make more of the gender neutral colors so that I'll end up with 80 blocks. That will translate into 4 quilts x 2 block styles for a total of 8 quilts to donate to Project Linus.    Here are my Crossroads blocks.

 And my Birds in the Air blocks, first in a chevron layout...

and in a different layout.

I am loving both of these blocks! The Crossroads blocks make such a fun secondary pattern and the Birds in the Air blocks will give me lots of layout options. I'm wondering what color we will be sewing with in February? I've loved working with pink this month.

This weekend is also the designated Sew In weekend for the Yahoo! Stashbusters group I belong to. Yesterday I pulled out my Christmas Stretched Star UFO and spread it out on my temporary table. I find that when I have to make my own design decisions I tend to procrastinate a lot. I've had this UFO out a few times and ended up stalled so I was determined to be brave, make a decision and move forward.

These are 5" charms from a swap I did years ago of metallic Christmas florals. They are really gorgeous! Last time I touched this I decided to make a table runner instead of a square table topper to best show them off on my long dining room table, but couldn't decide on the best size. 

Yesterday (Decision Day!) 4 x 12 blocks seemed like a good size so I laid the completed blocks sewn in pairs out by background color (light, green, red and black) and added some new charms to try and balance them a bit. Sometimes a bit of logic helps me work better with scrappy! I remembered having too many poinsettia prints the last time I laid them out so I added some variety. I had one too many black background so put it in the red column.

Do you know what is scary about working on old UFOs - see that strip of background fabric on the bottom? That is ALL I have left of that fabric! Talk about pressure to not waste a scrap with a mis-cut. I very carefully cut the corner squares needed to finish the new charms, laid them out in a pleasing way and started sewing them together. Here is half of the runner laying on top of the rest of the blocks.

Today I'll lay out the rest of them, take a picture of my layout for reference (I'm terrible at messing them up during assembly!) and add the top to the ready-to-sandwich group. I'm thinking a simple grid for quilting using gold thread, I want to let these fabrics shine without distraction.

 I'm linking up to soscrappy's Scrap Happy Saturday.