A Work in Progress

We have had a house full of kids (our own  three plus one of my daughter's housemates) since December 20.  We had a wonderful Christmas together with some very special memories.  I've also had a lot of meal preparation, washing dishes and laundry, and very little sewing time.  This morning, though, I had to take my daughter to an early appointment and when we got home, she fell asleep on the couch.  No one else was up, so I took a cup of coffee with me into the sewing room and spent some time straightening up and putting the threads from a finished project away while I listened to a podcast.  When I emerged, my husband and one of my sons were on their way out the door for some "guy" time (our other son went back to New York yesterday).  The girls were still asleep so I headed back down to the sewing room to start the block-of-the-month for my quilt guild.  We're using Barbara Brackman's Civil War Sampler this year and I decided to make 8" blocks.  The

My Scarlet Letter sampler, Scottish Band, is finished!  In my mind, it's a major accomplishment as I had to deal with a dye lot issue that caused me to frog the left half of the medium blue flame stitches as well as an issue with the chart.  For the life of me, I couldn't get the placement of the flame stitches on the chart to look like the picture of the sampler.  After I've lived with my finish for a week or two, I'm pretty pleased with the way it came out.  And I've almost forgotten what a pain it is to do the backstitches around the letters.  My Amazing Christmas Stars quilt is also done and in use.  This was a Designer Block of the Month from Fat Quarter Shop for 2009 or 2010.  It was hard to get a picture of the entire quilt inside my house, so the top two pictures are the left and right sides.  The bottom photo is a closer picture of the center of the quilt and the third one is of my favorite block.  My longarm quilter did feathers in an all