Lots of Dots and Other Things

The Dots on Dots blog hop schedule just went up the other day, and I'm really excited for this hop. Maybe the most excited I've been for a hop, which I think is hard to beat since I've been in some great ones already - Red, White & Blue and Think Christmas! You can see the full schedule for Dots on Dots here.

I went a little dot crazy for this hop. I signed up thinking, "Oh yeah, I have a lot of polka dot fabric I can use for this!" Then, I went to my stash, and found that the pieces I had were much smaller than I thought, and I had plans to make a full dots quilt top! That just wasn't going to do it! So, alas, I had to go fabric shopping. I know - you all feel so sorry for me! :)

This is where I went a little overboard. Here's all of the dots fabric that I have now. I've managed to cut everything that I'll need for my quilt top. I'll be making 20 12 inch finished blocks and the quilt will be 4x5 blocks with borders. That's a comfortable couch lap quilt. (My husband told me the other day that he'd like a quilt to wrap up with on the couch that isn't the Super Mario quilt. He doesn't want to accidentally get something on my masterpiece. Bless his heart, but this means I need to make another quilt! - Darn!)

So, I've got the whole quilt planned out, now I just need to actually make all of the blocks and sew it all together. Designing the blocks was one of my August 2012 crafty goals, so I've got another one down - that makes 3! Woo hoo I finished more than I did in July now!

I've never done a whole quilt just out of polka dot fabric and I think this is going to be really bright and festive. I've got some dark dots and some light dots and some bright dots - all kinds of dots going into this one. So, stay tuned for that. My day is September 11th. :) 

On another topic, I decided how I was going to put together the Think Christmas table runner. Layout #1 wins with the same cream-colored sashing I used inside the blocks for fabric. The back is a red and green holly print. Once I got it all sewed together then I wasn't sure how I wanted to quilt it. So I asked the most un-biased quilty person I know - my husband - what I should do. I asked "machine or hand quilt?" And he responded, "Do whatever you didn't do last time." Spoken like a true non-quilter, haha. So, I'm hand quilting this runner, and it's actually going very well and is a lot of fun. The only thing I've ever hand quilted before was my door hanger quilt for the Red, White & Blue blog hop. For that I only hand stitched part of the 12 inch block. So, this is taking me a little longer to finish, but I still hope to have it done by the end of August to help out with my August 2012 crafty goal count. I'll be giving this one to my Aunt Nancy in October when we go for a little visit to Michigan. So, even if it's not done by the end of August, it will be done before Christmas this year. :)

Happy crafting!