Philly Modern Quilt Guild Challenge

We had our challenge reveals at the Philly Modern Quilt Guild Meeting last Tuesday.  What fun.  We were given 4 fat quarters of Kona Solids (ruby, chocolate, snow and holly) and allowed to add 1 yard of fabric (the same or different adding up to 1 yard).

It is amazing what people come up with - so creative.  Some were "modern" some more traditional - all were fabulous!  I, not being terribly creative, went with the Christmas theme.  As soon as we got the fabrics, I pretty much knew what I was going to do and I was happy with the result....a really large table runner.  What am I going to do with it?  No idea.

I chose 1 yard of a paisley Christmas fabric from my stash that incorporated all the other colors.  I pieced together the red, brown and green "zig zags" first and my thought was to do all four fabrics that way - including the white.  Then I thought, I'd never put white in this quilt.  That was the challenge for me!  So, not wanting to take the easy way out and just do a white zig zag to get it done, I gave it some thought and decided to use it in the border.  Then, I thought I'd quilt the heck out of the white to give it some texture.  I really like the way it came out.  My first thought was pebbling.  I don't have microhandles on my HQ16 and I got about 1/4 of the way done on one triangle and my hands were a-hurtin'!  I quickly changed to very close loops and swirls and that was a bit better, but I was glad when it was done.  I then just did some straight lines in the solid zig zags. 

You can see the fabric I chose better in this photo.  You'll see it has gold in it.  So, when I got to the binding I was stumped again.  I didn't just want to use one of the solids (besides, I didn't have enough).  Black didn't work either, so I rummaged and pulled out a great gold I had in my stash and it worked great!

The second half of our meeting was an applique workshop with the wonderful Liz Hawkins of the Lizzie B Creative girls.  I was so looking forward to the workshop and got about 1/2 hour in and the headache that had been plaguing me all day reared itself again and I started feeling pretty bad so had to leave.  Up til then I was having a ball!  I'm looking forward to next month's meeting.  Our challenge is to come up with a challenge!  At first I thought, I could never think of something.  But something came to me a couple of days later.  I'll reveal that next month!

So, this weekend we had another Santa's bakeshop in my house.  Yesterday, I made more shortbread (I'm a little sick of shortbread about now), pizzelles, toffee, and got a start on the Hot Tarragon Mustard (from Robin Sue's Big Red Kitchen blog - she's doing an Advent recipe-a-day which has been fabulous - so many great holiday food items) that I'll finish up today.  That's a new one on my Christmas food-gift list. 

Oh another easy recipe for a fun food gift item is the recipe for Caramel Corn with Salted Peanuts I found last year on Molly Wizenberg's Orangette blog (well, easy if you can pop popcorn in the microwave properly - it's a long story, and many bags of popcorn were harmed in the making of the Caramel Corn this year.  But, I wanted to bring it to the guild meeting last week so I perservered).  This stuff is divine, I'm telling ya!

I can't believe this time next week "it will all be over" as we say in our house!