Before I do anything else, I have to brag on my dear friend, Lisa.  She brought me the nicest present last night!  It’s a zippered pouch that uses the fabric and leaves from the Bloom block, and the Dresden is from the Splendid Sampler block that we did not too long ago.  Isn’t that pretty much the cutest thing ever?!  And I am showing you a close-up of her stitching because she is pretty much perfect all the time, every time.  The attention to detail was over the top!  She made it to fit our Splendid Sampler blocks, and I told her that I might also use it for traveling to hold my EPP pieces because it fits perfectly in my purse.  Oh, and she also gave me a magazine and several of the thing-a-ma-bobs that hold your bobbin on top of your thread.

If you are doing the Splendid Sampler, hop on over to Facebook and do a search on guild or something like that to see an ingenious idea for a ID badge for quilt guild meetings.  As it happens, I walked into our meeting last night and confessed that yes, I had lost my badge.  No problem, said the greeter!  You can make one of your own!  Whew!

My first question was what would the front of it look like.  I thought about it, went through some patterns I had and decided on paper piecing a mariner’s compass.  The book I have for it, by Elizabeth Dackson, had just what I was looking for.  Her designs are for 12″ blocks so I printed it at 50% for 4 copies.  Then I went into my fabrics to see what I had and decided red, white, blue and gold was the plan!

Then I had to crawl through that sorry excuse of a mess that I call a sewing table to find my rotary cutter and add-a-quarter ruler.  That took more time than it should have!  This block has 4 identical squares that each finish out (now) at 3×3″ and then each square has A, B, C, and D.  And for good measure I think there are 7 pieces within each number.

It isn’t finished yet, but this is part A of one of the squares that’s done.  No hurry since I have a month or so to get it done.  The one on Facebook includes a zipper (gasp!) on the back to hold cash and any drawing tickets, etc.  It’s entirely possible that I will be spending more time trying to avoid the zipper than I would if I just gave up and sewed one it.

Stay tuned…