Little pretties

My head is way too full of ideas at the moment!  If I sat down and wrote a list of everything I want to do right now it would fill pages and pages...

For the moment I'm trying really hard to keep things small, and to get some W.I.Ps out of the way first, but it's not easy...  temptation is everywhere...  

I had to order some solid to finish a project, so, whilst I was at it, I ordered some solids to make a quilt I've had in mind.  Seriously, I did well just stopping at *one* of the quilts I have in mind...  Anyway, when I received my solids, Annie (at The Village Haberdashery) also sent me these...

These are charms of Hope Chest prints.  Now, to be honest, I'd seen them in the shop and skipped past them, they just didn't really appeal to me.  I've looked again at the on line pictures, and, well, they are pretty, they just don't really appeal to me.   I'm blown away by how differently I feel towards them seeing them in real life though!  They are LOVELY!  I must have taken dozens of photos of them, and it still wasn't coming across in my photos either, but they really are gorgeous.  

On the right are my favourite prints - the cross stitch one especially.   I don't really do cross stitch much, something about being faced with the blank canvas and having to count the position of every stitch, it just makes me sooo tired and sleepy.  This print has all the stitches marked for you!  I'd love to get a bit of this roses print though, Annie has even put together a matching threads kit especially for it....  

How cool is that?  All the work done for you (practically).  

I got some other lovely post too, the smallest, cutest little brown packet, which contained this wee cracker!

A brilliant wee thread catcher from Helen!  She's awffy lovely is Helen.  It's in use already as I'm currently working on these as my sofa project.

Hopefully I've got enough hexies here to do a nice cushion.  There are certainly enough here to have given me some nice callouses already...  

Upstairs in the cupboard I've managed to get this months bee blocks done, just in the nick of time.  Fiona sent us all a parcel with some treasured fabrics - favourite lines, vintage sheets, table cloths, doilies - all fabrics with special memories for her.  Some of them were very difficult to cut into!!  She asked us for 12" blocks of low value fabrics, with a 6" block contained within the 12" which would be a traditional quilt block done in high value fabrics.   I knew Fiona trusted us, but boy oh boy I felt the pressure on this one!  I just really wanted to do a good job for her.

I like my blocks.  I do...actually, I'd like to keep my blocks!  I could easily have sat up there and made another two!  However, in the interest of learning, I do think I messed up a bit with my high value choices in the first block.  The brown is an area which should be secondary to the bits I've done orange, but the brown is so dark it really jumps out first.  Also, the text print is, I think, detracting from the orange too.  Its so funny how different things look when its large chunks of fabric as opposed to small block parts.  

I do think that Fiona is going to end up with the most beautiful quilt though.  Everyone's blocks so far have been so lovely.

Quick question before I go....  Does anyone use Spotify?  I got a bit lost into it the other night....  I love making playlists, I love that it has so.much.music to choose from, I love that I can sit and listen to whole albums without actually buying them, but is there some kind of point to it all that I'm missing?  I'm on the free download at the moment, and its bugging me already that I have to be online and at the laptop to hear it...  And to pay to download songs is so expensive.  And OMG the adverts....  that is so unbelievably annoying.   Is there any other way to share the playlists than Facebook?  I hate that I've been on it one night and already I'm trying to justify in my head signing up for a monthly contract...
No.  No!  I wont do it.  I need Cd's in my hand.... I hate only having a download.  I don't like digital music players.  Don't get me wrong, dead handy on journeys (says she that rarely leaves the house) and fun for making playlists and "mixtapes".  But only as an "in addition to Cd's" kind of a way...  Mmmmm Mixtapes...  That reminds me, that's another quilt I *need* to make...

(if anyone wants to have a nosey at my first mixtape on spotify I don't know how to link to it.... but... I've tweeted it.  Yes, I'm on twitter.  If you think I sound pretty clueless about Spotify you aint seen nothing yet...I'm on twitter as sleepinsarah.  I don't tweet much, I don't know what I'm doing there, I can barely remember to charge the phone up...)