Yesterday I went to Sorrento to the Point Nepean Group's Exhibition. As usual after viewing lots of lovely quilts I came home all inspired and so will endeavour to spend more time at my machine over the next couple of months. I have also been looking favourably on the Bridal Sampler of Elm Creek fame. Will I or won't I is the question? As I am doing blocks with my friendship group which are 9 inch I will probably leave the Bridal Sampler for now although I do covet it.

This is the 2nd block in friendship group pattern swap.

This is the first block in my friendship groups pattern swap. We hope to make some very exciting and different 'sampler quilts' It will be interesting to see how they all end up as we are using our own fabrics.

A new year of my friendship group begins. Once again we are swapping a 10 inch square of fabric each month and I have decided to make mine into Ohio Stars which I will alternate with nine patches for the quilt. All very scrappy. Hopefully I will use up some of the many 5 and 6 inch charm squares I have as well as left overs from other quilts.

As well members are taking turns in supplying a pattern each month. Our challenge is to make something interesting other than the ordinary sampler quilt which many of us made as our first quilt. Our first blocks are a Jacobs Ladder and a Pinwheel Star. I have many metres of plain white very fine homespun which was purchased for a Baltimore Quilt. I have made a few blocks but I just know I am not going to do as many as I originally planned so am using it for the block challenge along with red and blue. I will try and put some of the blocks up as I do them.

A small quilt in my favorite colours. It was made in a class with Angie Solomon when she was promoting her book 'Angies Angles'. Somehow I have changed this post to double spacing, I will have to find out how I accidently did this and undo it for future posts. It seems that I haven't learnt very much over the past year of blogging, I'm still floundering around and spending far more time than I had anticipated just uploading one small photograph and putting some text with it. Hopefully during this year I will finally get my act together and learn a bit more.... I am looking forward to another year at my friendship group. We have decided to once again swap the 10 inch squares of fabric the same as 2008 but as well we are going to swap patterns each month. This enables us to use our own fabric and make using the size of our own choosing. The challenge will be to put them all together at the end, not just in the old sampler format.

This has has been quite a long time in the making. I am not usually into stitcheries but this one which is an adaptation of Kerri Gillesppi's pattern is one I really enjoyed doing. I was struggling to find a hand pieced design which took my fancy so happened on these embroidery designs in 'A Little Different' in Geelong and fell in love with them. I have used a little bit of creative licence but am very pleased with the result. Soft and pretty.