Spring or not?

We're flirting with spring here in southeastern Michigan.  Most of the snow has melted (except some of those giant mountains left by snowplows in store parking lots), temperatures are milder and a few crocuses are peeking up.  We are hopeful....

Our color study challenge for Great Lakes Heritage Quilters in April is "LEMON".    I struggled with this, as always, and feel that the two shining stars in our challenge so far are Sandy Kaufman (last year's guild president) and Patty Kreh ("if you're wearing brown, stand up--you're my volunteers!").  What they have done so far is wonderful and looks effortless.  Are they struggling with these at all??  I always picture myself just whipping up something amazing, but anything worthwhile and beautiful requires WORK.  Mine are not turning out as I picture.  This is my 2nd attempt at "Lemon", and I think it will stand as is.  I need to move on.  Lemon at this time of year made me think of daffodils and lemony sunshine coming in the windows.  Ahhhhh.......spring!  The sun & it's rays are machine quilted in lemony thread, the daffodils the result of some paper-piecing, which is definitely challenging for me.  My first effort at this project languishes on the design wall, sentenced to the scrap heap or being crumpled up somewhere....  Time to move on!

While working on both a guild charity quilt and a red & white challenge for my small group, the Chickens, I had a pile of small HST red and white, cut off from something else.  In my new efforts to use such things, I fed them thru the machine as leaders & enders (while working on other things), then squared them up.  I now have a sandwich bag filled with them.  It took me maybe two weeks to get them all sewed and then squared up.  They look quite pretty and may go in my red & white project.  Top Secret, by the way.  You won't see photos of it here til fall......

Lastly, but not least, what is one of the time-honored rituals of spring?  Why Spring Cleaning of course!  As a quilter, my duty is SPRING RE-STASHING.  Your stash also deserves to be freshened up in the spring.  So I visited a couple local quilt shops and bought some pieces that caught my fancy.

That and two guild-related meetings this week, the Quilt Show Committee for GLHQ's 2015 quilt show, and the monthly meeting of the Detroit Area Modern Quilt Guild.

That was my quilting week; how was yours?