Snowflakes up the wazoo...

Not the wet cold kind, but more the thread and needle type.

I've mentioned before that my mom and I are both working on making the quilt Winter Wonderland by Crabapple Hill.  (You'll have to click on the link to see a picture of the whole quilt.)  She's doing hers in blues and creams and I'm using neutral colored flannels and black floss for mine.

Our first step is to embroider the ten blocks that make up the center.  When I visited her last weekend, she was working on her very last one which also happens to be the biggest.

Mom's Winter Wonderland Block

 She only had a tiny bit left (which she's since finished) of one of the trees and a few snowflakes.

Didn't she do a great job with her embroidery stitches?  She used a deep blue DMC perle cotton for hers on Bone colored Kona cotton.

I'm actually working on the same block.  It's not my last one; I still have two more to go after I finish it.  But after hearing her talking about how hard this one was compared to the others, I thought I'd go ahead and get it out of the way.  I'm like that in most things.  I generally do the hard or unpleasant tasks first and save the more enjoyable things for last.  It gives me more to look forward to.  In any case, here's how far I had gotten on mine when we compared...

The start of my block

Hmmm.  Not very far at all.  Each block has a lot of snowflakes with millions of tiny circles.  (That's only a slight exaggerration.)

See all those circles?  As another example of getting the hard part over with, I'm stitching all the snowflakes (and their circles) first.  I believe there are 22 of the devils in this one block.  However, since I took this picture, I've managed to finish all of them and have moved on to one of the trees.  Those are much easier and more enjoyable to stitch.

As I mentioned, this is block #8 for me and I have 2 smaller ones to complete after this one.  I'm eager to finish them so I can get back to some hand applique.  I'm on block 11 of this quilt and I hope to actually finish it in time for Halloween this year...

Baltimore Halloween by P3 Designs

Pearl P. Pereira designed this Baltimore Halloween quilt and I have to say that her patterns are a pleasure to work with.  There are several others I'd like to do and in fact, I'm getting her Baltimore Christmas one as a block of the month right now from Shabby Fabrics.

Until later...

“Let us stop just saying that we love people. Let us really love them, and show it by our actions.”  

1 John 3:18 (LB)