Progress here and there

I've been working on lots of projects, I can never decide what's most important, especially with some deadlines 2 months away yet. It's so easy to get distracted and to start thinking about other projects. But Christmas is approaching and my Friday night quilt group has it's annual Block exchange and I thought I would be smart and start working on them now! We have our Annual Christmas dinner and afterwards we go to someone's house and play some silly FQ games and exchange our blocks. We have 8 in our group and every year 2 different people choose what the Exchange Block will be for that year. This year is an Sister's Album block? We all get the same pattern and then we each pass out cards of what type/color fabrics we'd like. We are such a varied group with definite likes/dislikes and we have found that way to be the best way to ensure everyone likes their blocks.

Mary passed out the star point batik fabric and asked us to add more to it to match. Lisa passed out little snippets of the red/gold that she liked and asked us to choose fabrics that looked good with her samples.

Cheryl passed out various pieces of the Holly Jolly line from last year and asked us to coordinate to those colors. She did give us enough of one color to use.

Candy passed out all the 'colored' fabrics and we just were to add our own backgrounds.

Before we swap blocks, we are to put a 'quote' in the middle area and sign it. I'm trying to decide if I'm going to use the same quote for all or choose one for each person.

As I was working on these blocks, it reminded me that I have been getting further and further behind on assembling my blocks of past. So, I dug up the oldest one that wasn't finished from 2004 (we've been doing this since 1997). This is the block that I made for everyone--in their colors of course. This is my block.

We chose a pattern to work from, then made all sorts of revisions, etc. It hardly looks like the same quilt. I'm almost done with the top..I'll share when it's done. 1 almost down, 4 more tops to finish. It's challenging at times to come up with a unique setting for our blocks. We've shown our quilts twice now in a Special exhibit at a local Art's Castle and I'm afraid it will come up again and I'll be woefully behind. So, now is a good time to catch up. :)