Snow Day/Quilt Day

We had another big snowstorm yesterday!  Yes, after getting 13" on Friday we got 16' yesterday! Don't think, though, that this means we now have 29" on the ground.  No, the 70 degree weather and bright sun we enjoyed over the weekend melted most of Friday's snow so we had clean streets and sidewalks when yesterday's storm started.  

Like the Friday storm, this one had been forecast as just a few inches, with the main storm being off to the eastern plains. Instead, it shifted a bit west, just enough to clobber us. This one was a heavy wet snow which brought down tree branches all over the area, causing our power to flicker on and off alarmingly all day.  

Another storm of just a few inches is predicted for Saturday; I wonder if it, too, will shift and end up being a big one?

Of course we shoveled and shoveled and, it seemed, shoveled some more.  

But I also made a lot of progress on some of my quilting projects. I'm part of a small group of quilters who meet together to try new techniques and we had challenged ourselves to make a small quilt with flowers using a fused (glued) method. Before the quilt retreat I had decided to use a photo of a poppy in my yard as inspiration.

Drawing on the work of quilter Terry Kramzar, who starts her designs by piecing together quilted 4" squares, I had made this background during the retreat.   

Yesterday I got up my courage to take the next step, translating the actual flower photo into fabric pieces. I choose to make a pattern for the flowers, something I've never done.  It didn't exactly go the way I thought, but I did like this result. 

Then I tackled the poppy leaves. Can you see them down at the bottom?

Then, thinking about Terry Kramzar's backgrounds, I tried adding little squares to the background.  How's this? Maybe too distracting.

How about these darker ones, and only in the emptier spaces?   Decisions, decisions.  It can be exhausting!  A good time to do something else for a while. 

Another challenge I've got going on is improving my machine quilting.  I joined Leah Day's online monthly class which means piecing and quilting a block every month.  At the end of the year we'll sew these quilted blocks together into a big quilt. I've decided that mine will be an outreach quilt, probably one for a foster child, so I'm making seasonal blocks. 

Here's my March block before quilting, complete with all-star cats ready for the Oscars.  

Here it is quilted according to the quilting design Leah posted. This isn't good quilting but at least it's practice. Leah doesn't like us be negative about our practice pieces, so let me just say that the overall affect is okay.    

Here's the back, which I think is pretty cute.  

After the day's challenges of shoveling, designing, and quilting, I was ready for our evening cocktail and a good bowl of homemade chili. Nothing like comfort food on a snow day!