This is one of the patterns that I bought in Houston, along with the stand. It is also the first of anything that I have finished from that Houston trip. It was a lot of fun to make, and easier than I expected.

Pat received this for his Valentine’s gift, but not until after I had used it at my Guild’s miniature meeting today.

Yes, I fell way behind on finishing up my annual Community Quilt. This quilt was my Leader and Ender project for 2014-2015. I used a scrappy combination of one and a half inch squares for the 16-patches. Those patches were interspersed with scrappy brick blocks.

I originally pin-basted this over the island in the kitchen but it didn’t take me long to realize that this just wasn’t going to work. I had to remove all the pins (and folks at the Guild laugh at me for the large number of pins I use), tape the backing to the floor and get on my hands and knees to re-pin.

I used my ruler templates for the free motion quilting; this was my first attempt with the simplest of rulers – the 12″ Arc. Because of the size of the panels I wasn’t able to get a good overall design going so there were a lot of knots to be tied in and buried.

At the end of the day I had to use a fabric marker to cover up some of the blemishes on the back of the quilt.

Some of those gift card holders held gift cards for books. Each grandchild received a book of my choosing but, in case they didn’t like what I picked, they can pick their own. I think all of the books purchased were the first in a series; I didn’t plan it that way but that seems to be the way it worked out. I made a bookmark to add into each of their books.

Can you guess who got which bookmark?