"Cruising" to the Sew Fun Cruise

Well, this will be my last post (maybe) before I start on my first cruise, as I join Veronica on the Round Bobbin's 2013 Sew Fun Cruise through the Western Caribbean!!

I am so excited! I'm hoping you decided to join me on my adventure. The Sew Fun Cruise, lifts anchor from New Orleans, LA, otomorrow for a week long adventure through the Caribbean stopping in ports such as Falmouth, Jamaica Georgetown, Grand Cayman and Cozumel, Mexico on Royal Caribbean's Navigator of the Seas!

I can't wait! I wonder if the captain will let me have a hand, er ..."paw" at the wheel for a bit?

This year Veronica will be teaching 6 hands-on classes and 3 lectures and has spent the past few weeks cutting and packaging kits for the classes. There was so much stuff, I had to sit on some suitcases to get them closed! Veronica and I were talking and she said she always cuts extra kits, so this year she has decided to do a give-a-way!

When Veronica returns from the cruise, we'll invetory and tell you what goodies we have and how many winners we will choose, but I can tell you that we will hold the drawing on March 15. That gives you one month to sign up!!

"How do I sign up?," you ask. Well, leave a comment on this blog (any post about the cruise kit give-a-way) with your name and email to reach you. Then we'll put your name in the drawing. Want to get more entries? Well if you "Like" our Facebook page you'll get another entry! That's two chances to get lucky in our drawing!

Well, wish me luck everyone! We are on our way to Lousiana and tomorrow we will board the boat!

A Pocketful of Posies ... Um, I Mean Pansies ...

Needle Turn 

Ok, more good news on the cruise front. Today I'm going to show you one of the projects we'll be working on. It's called Poppy Magic.

The pattern is really called Patch of Poppies, but I got confused. Oh, well, at least everybody knows that they are poppies. The pattern is by one of our friends, Nancy Murty. She has had some great applique patterns and Veronica has made most of them. A lot of them are retired, but we still love them and have those quilts hanging in our office. Veronica will be teaching this class with 3 different ways to make the blocks.

The first is of course her favorite, fusible applique. The second is sewing the poppies down with a machine stitch and the third will be needle turn. I've heard a runor that we're going to have the new Janome 8900's in our classrooms. I just love that machine! I get very excited when I see it. Have you seen it? Check out Janome's website. See you tomorow with more news.



Fusible

Cruising Closer to Departure Time

We're counting down the days to our cruise. We'll be sailing the high seas, we'll be quilting, laughing and of course, eating.

We've got some great stuff lined up for our classes.  New products to share, new fabrics to give out in our classes, cute projects and of course, we'll be blinging up some of those projects. They'll both be in the mystery classes, so I can't tell, but you'll love it! I might bling myself up too. I've always wanted to be a flashy bear.

One of our classes, The Grandmother's Flower Garden, is being offered in the traditional way as well as a scrappy Hexagon quilt that I started last week and I've got a pretty good section going. It's cute as can be, it'll cover me and probably one or two of the grandbabies. They just love to cuddle and drag me around. Veronica is working on her version as well. She's been running around grabbing all the charm squares she finds. I just go in behind her and "borrow" them so I'm not having to run around looking for any.

We're using the 2" Hexagons from Paper Pieces, you may remember that I took pictures with them at their booth in October when we were at Houston Quilt Market (see below). They have lots of great English paper piecing patterns. Veronica made a grandmother's flower garden in 1/4" hexagons a while back. I'll see if I can find that quilt and let you see it, it was part of a "Solo" Round Robin that she did with some of her friends. Well, I gotta run, isn't the life of a bear just great?

     


In the words of Chistopher Robbin, "Silly ol' bear!"

Jaggie was cutting up and cracking jokes at the
Paper Pieces booth at Quilt Market 2012.