I'm still here

Hey everyone, I'm back!  Life has been full and busy -- mainly all good, thankfully.  I have been doing a little bit of sewing, but not much.  Here's a peek at my new project.

The pattern is from the recent Fons & Porter magazine and is from Piece O' Cake Designs.  I've wanted to do an applique quilt for a long time, and this seemed an ideal project.  I'm using lightweight fusible and will machine applique the shapes to the background.  Although I have tried my hand at needle-turn applique with some small projects like this one, I decided that was a bit to challenging for me to tackle at this point.

The most difficult part so far, was selecting the background fabrics.  The Piece O' Cake quilt featured in the magazine has a very colorful background, but looks cohesive because all of the fabrics are from POC's own fabric line.  I wanted to use all fabrics from my stash and not make any unnecessary purchases, so I spent a lot of time auditioning different fabrics until finally settling on what you see here.

My kids' spring break was at the beginning of the month.  I spent a week at home on a "stay-cation".  One day I took my daughter to the park for a picnic.

We had fun hanging out on our quilt, playing Scrabble on my Kindle.

This is an old Bento box quilt made from Japanese fabric.  It usually lives on the couch, but served equally well as a picnic quilt.

The view from our quilt.

I hope everyone is enjoying their Spring!