Take It Further March - Day 1

Just a quick update for today:



I'm off to clean out the cupboards in my kitchen.

Take It Further Challenge March & Finishes

I did some sewing yesterday and finished a few of my projects. First are my little doorknockers:





Next, I finished the Floral "A" block into a pillow/cushion for my mother for her birthday:



I didn't get to the finishing on my Spring purse yet because I need to pick up some purse handles. I expect to get that sewn up next week.

In the meantime, I have my Take It Further Challenge March block all pieced now:



You can see the little hummingbird pin that I found over the weekend. I'll start stitching on this later today.

I'd also like to mention that my "Elegant Crazy Quilt Seam Treatments" E-Book is now available in PDF format.



I want to take a moment to say thank you to Carolyn Cibik at Evening Star Designs for her kindness in offering to convert it to PDF format for me. Thank you Carolyn! I'm not a computer whiz. I know what I need to know and creating a PDF file was not one of them! I very much appreciate Carolyn's generous offer to help me.

Finally for today, there's a Flickr group set up for stitcher's who are working with the designs in the book. A few ladies have posted photos so please stop by to see how other stitcher's use the designs!

Take It Further Palette March

We did finally get our Bald Eagle weekend! Our photos didn't come out well though. This photo is from our Eagle weekend last year:



If you would like see more of my photos from last year, click on the image to go to my Flickr site.

Sharon B. has announced the concept and color palette for the March Take It Further Challenge. I've matched up the DMC Floss colors to Sharon's palette:



Here is Sharon's theme for March:

Do you ever notice the little things, the small moments, the details in life? This months challenge is to do just that, pay attention to the tiny details. Sometimes the small things become emblematic for something larger.

While reading Sharon's blog post, I immediately thought of the most beautiful tiny detail I know of. What would a Summer garden be without a hummingbird! They're so little, you would miss them if you weren't looking for them.

And for reasons I won't mention here, they're personally significant to me. So, I have chosen a Hummingbird as my detail for the March challenge. I bought a beautiful crystal hummingbird pin over the weekend to use on my block. I will also be working with Sharon's color palette.

I'm going to run my sewing machine today. I have a few things that need sewing up and I'd like to get my block put together as well so I can start stitching on it.

Spring Purse Embellishing

I spent quite a bit of time stitching on this yesterday and as you can see, I painted the lace piece as well:



I asked yesterday if anyone wanted to guess what the focal point will be. So far, I haven't received the correct answer. I won't reveal that now. I'll let you all keep guessing but I do expect to add that later today so you should find out what it is tomorrow. It's an usual thing to add to a crazy quilt.

I'll give you a couple of little hints. The object is quite specific to the season. Think Spring everyone! Think "new life"!

Spring Purse Continued......

I have all the seams stitched now so it's time to start embellishing!



All of the seam treatments are from Volume 2 of my Elegant Crazy Quilt Seam Treatments
E Book. Volume 1 is available here and Volume 2 will be released in late March.

I have a few chores to take care of and then I plan to spend the rest of the day stitching. I may paint that lace piece today too.

Does anyone want to guess what the focal point on this piece will be? It's not a pin and it's not something that will be embroidered on. It's an object.