Two steps forward, one step back.

I'm making progress on my Harold and the Purple Crayon mini quilt. After I'd fused and glued all the white foreground and purple cording, I remembered that I'd intended to quilt the background before I added anything to it. Now, like Harold, I am going to come up with another strategy to meet the needs of this project. I'm going to try to FMQ some words in the background.

I must enhance Harold's face and hand.
I'm nervous about doing it with stitching,
and may stick with permanent ink.

I'm also working on this small quilt, which I am currently calling Farm Girl. 

It also must be finished in the next two weeks so it can hang in the upcoming multi-guild quilt show. It needs more quilting in the motifs, quilting in the border, words in the center of the wreath, and some hand quilting. And binding, and a hanging sleeve on the back. 

It would be fun to quilt every inch of this thing, but I'm going to call it finished, soon!
You can see the wreath needs an outline stitch, and I'll add a phrase in the middle.
I'm going to try the lettering feature on my sewing machine.

I have bee blocks to make for this month, too. Lisa McG's request for paper-pieced Mosaic blocks led to flurry of fabric pulling to find cute features for the centers of the quadrants. Lisa has graciously agreed to me sending her the quadrants not sewn together into blocks, and  with their paper still on the back. She can mix them in with hers, and that's another project crossed off my list!

So much cuteness!

I have yet to make bee blocks for Lysa M, but I think I'll be squeezing those into the last few days of the month. Unless, of course, we decide to go away for Memorial Day weekend. Then I'll hole myself up in my sewing room, and the family will have to fend for themselves. ahhh, sewing stress is the best kind of stress!

Yoohoo! I'm over here!

Here I go again! Kind of like this Christmas cactus, blooming the first week of January.

Better late than never!

Yes, I've moved my blog from "Cheery Chirp" to this new space, "Chirp." Certainly I intend to still strive for a cheery presentation, but the title was too cute, don't you agree? Chirp is the title I first chose when I tried this blogger stuff, and Cheery Chirp is what I ended up with when I couldn't figure out how to do it the first time around. I've figured out some stuff, though, and I hadn't let go of this name, so here I am, now.

Apart from the fun association of the word chirp with the twitter and tweeting phenomenon, it was a nickname I acquired during my first year in college, because I had a funny, squeaking laugh. Confession: I liked the attention I got from that laugh, so I began to do it intentionally, and it got annoying. I hope I learned that lesson; I love the positive attention/feedback I get from you, my readers, on this blog, and I will try not to get too cute with it!

I participate in a book club, with women I've met mostly via school employment. It's everything I hoped it would be: intelligent women sharing their thoughts and associations with good books, and social connections with people who make room in their hearts and lives for other people and ideas. We read some good books last year,  and seem to have focused on strong women in times past with Jane Eyre and Rebecca, Half Broke Horses and Follow the River, and The Shell Seekers. We thought Catch-22 was too sarcastic, and we were inspired by Same Kind of Different as Me. Another confession: I didn't read Follow the River, because I was busy sewing. I think that makes this wall hanging I made rather ironic. 

Book lovers never go to bed alone.

Last year I participated in an on-line quilt-along;

And I used Christmas fabrics to make the blocks. I put them together just in time for us to use all through December, in this quilt:

Confession: whenever I sat down to watch a Christmas movie with the family, or the occasional Jeopardy or The Closer episode, I had this quilt on my lap, adding decorative quilt stitches with embroidery floss. It wasn't really, completely finished until a few days before Christmas. I'm sorry I don't have a close-up photo for you to see, it's really cute, though!

That's three confessions, a good way to start the new year! I think I'm going to connect this blog a little more to the projects I'm working on, and the occasional picture of me and the family enjoying life. Maybe there will be more interaction with the quilting/blogging community. I hope I'll continue to hear from you, I sure do appreciate your comments!