o/~ I'm going quilting in the morning~

...ding-dong, the bells are going to chime!
Don't want to miss her, pack up the scissors,
get me to the workshop on time!

(With apologies to Stanley Holloway.)

Yesterday was my annual workshop!  It was a close thing; Squiddle is undergoing potty training currently, and getting to spend the day with Nana and Gampa both for my Wednesday guild meeting and the Thursday workshop was presented as a reward.  Fortunately, he seems to have gotten the peeing only in the toilet part down.  The pooping only in the toilet... well, that one remains a work in progress. :/

But!  He met the conditions Wonderful Husband and I had set, so he and Jazzy spent time with my parents and I took a workshop from Deanne Eisenman.  It wasn't packed - there were only nine other students - so we got a lot of individual attention.  The workshop project was one of the wallhanging quilts from her book Blooming Patchwork.  I liked the blocks in the wallhanging, but even more, I wanted to start learning hand applique.

Deanne's version of the quilt was done in lovely Civil War reproduction fabrics, but I decided I wanted to try working with the batiks I've picked up here and there over the years (seriously, I have no idea where I got most of them), with a few mottled tone-on-tone prints to make up the gaps.  I think I'd read somewhere that the tightly woven nature of batiks made them excellent for applique, maybe?  Plus I want a bright wallhanging.  The two I've done so far are both on the darker side.

Here's the pieced block I completed in class:

And here is my first foray into needle-turn applique:

(Yes, I deliberately fussy-cut the blue so the star would be in the center of the medallion.)  I've finished this medallion and moved on to the second one, and it's a bit weird how I can already tell that I'm better at it this evening than I was this afternoon.

But for now, as I write this, sleep calls, especially since I've been shorting myself of it the last two nights... on the evening end by frantically pressing and cutting pieces for the workshop, and on the morning end by getting myself and the boys up and dressed and fed and out the door so I could drop them off at my parents' place in time to get where I was going.

Sleep!