Easy Street DWM January 14,2013

These are my first two completed blocks from Bonnie Hunter's Easy Street Mystery Quilt .  She runs a mystery during December every year.  I've made several of the quilts and, while I curse all the fiddly little units, I fall in love with each quilt.  My color choice gave me some pause but after I got all the seams sewn on these blocks I'm starting to really like it.  Each block is a 5-patch, most of those patches have multiple parts so putting together each block feels a little like accomplishing an entire tiny quilt.

I arranged all the parts on my design wall because there are so many opportunities for mistakes and then I debated how to get it transported to my machine without scrambling everything.  DUH!  I do this all the time when I sew an entire quilt together.  So, I stacked all the units just as I would stack all the blocks for webbing a quilt together.  I have a little tutorial planned for tomorrow.

Hop over to Judy's blog and see what everyone else is up to.  Then, go have a productive day.

Chris

DWM 1/7/13

I was gifted a bunch of red/white/black half-square triangles.  They sat and sat, not enough for a quilt but they didn't really go with anything in my stash.  I was out on an innocent trip to the LQS with a friend and several red and white fat quarters jumped into my hand and whispered that they'd play well with the HSTs.  I still may do some rearranging but I'm pretty happy and plan to make this a Linus Quilt.

Go see what others are up to at Judy's blog.

Chris

What is it?

I was going through photos on my phone and I found this one that I don't recall taking.  What does she have in her mouth?  Sadly, I suspect it is one of my very old felt elves. 
She might not make it to next Christmas.

Chris

Finished it!

At 8:15 last night I put the final piece in this misbegotten excuse of a puzzle. The copyright date on it is 1979. I think it's been languishing in my game closet since then. It had to have been a gift from someone who hated me. 
If you look closely you will see that the entire puzzle is comprised of thousands (yes, THOUSANDS) of line-drawn naked people.  My son helped me put together the edges and a few clumps of pieces that had words. Then he declared the thing to be Satan and impossible and no way was he having any more to do with it.  "There's no way anyone can finish this puzzle!" Well, that just sounded like a challenge to me. I'm stupid that way.  Well that and my younger son bet me $20.00 I couldn't finish it by Sunday!
Turns out the saving grace to this puzzle is that all of the naked people are standing with their heads to the top, lined up in rows.
To solve the danged thing I had to line up all the pieces in rows and columns oriented in the same head-to-the-top position.  Then I would choose an area on the puzzle, find the corresponding person on the box top and begin the hunt.  Eventually I reorganized the pieces so those with "bumps" top and bottom were to the left side of the puzzle and those with "bumps" left and right were to the right.  My hunting chant went something like this,"big round boobs facing left". You get the idea. I could only work on it for 29 minutes or so before I got sick of looking at naked "parts."  

I'll be surprised if this hasn't injured some part of my "intimate" psyche! 

Have a great day!

Chris