Here is the Daily Creative Prompt Challenge for February 2017 that I want to start. I plan to put a picture on Instagram daily for each challenge as well as the group on Facebook called My Creative Corner3. They are designed to be short challenges most days that will spark your creative center in your brain. It is designed for quilters and does have a couple of sewing challenges. I find when I engage in some different activities then I feel more creative projects get done and ideas for new ones are generated, too!

I finished my improv fairy garden It is small about 22 by 27 inches. Two blocks are paper pieced, the tumbling tiny mushrooms and the house. I have EQ6 and the tiny mushrooms are a block already loaded in that program. The mushroom house was a free paper pieced block found here.

The rest of the quilt was just making mushrooms of different shapes and sizes. They are randomly cut squares or rectangles with some background color added to the corners to round the mushroom cap and then attach it to a strip that has the stem sewn in the middle. I added a couple of tiny trees. I tried to have the background colors suggest shading . The large to small mushroom size from bottom to top was to suggest perspective. Now to add it to the stack of quilts to be quilted. I decided to try making  a few small quilts for 2017 in a series to learn a technique or learn about color stories. Gwen Marsten called the small quilts little sketches.

Look what I found in my orphan block drawer!. My entire chop stick challenge from quilt group last year. I put them on the design wall and found the grey fabric I bought for the blank blocks to break  up the crossed stick blocks. Jane from group did this and it was exactly what this needed, a few places to rest the eye and accent the quilting. I am about halfway thru putting the rows together. It will be 6×7 and the blocks are 8.5 inches.

The long arm frame is fixed, yes! It needed new plastic rail pieces. It is smooth for the longarm to travel across the frame. See those straight lines, means it is all good.  My husband helped me do this. I couldn’t do the heavy lifting to get the job done. Now I can tackle that stack of quilts I have plus 3 customer quilts.

pic is the ice in the inside of my car’s windsheild

Snow has returned and the winter wonderland has returned. It is much colder so I am snuggled under a quilt and/or in a wrap most of the time. I wake most days by the sounds of snow removal banging in the parking lots or scraping the roads and at night I hear the snowmobiles traveling in front of my house headed to the trails. An odd sound today was that of a train whistle, must be bringing more salt for the road commission.

Vicki