it's my half birthday!

6 months ago I threw myself a big shindig .
Oh what a sweet day that was. I had so much cake that finally that last piece I couldn't possibly eat it after eating cake for 4 days! I decided to freeze it and celebrate my half birthday.

What would a half birthday be without sewing?
I joined a cool quilting project online called Project Improv.
It's basically a different style of willy nilly piecing (sewing) quilts together.
To be part of the group you make a quilt square for charity then you make something for yourself!
Here's my charity block: I chose the orange and pink group.
I do hope there'es enough orange and pink.
I had fun making this block! Now onto other fun projects!

I'm busy finishing up swaps and such because I want to sew for fun and for us.
Since I'm killing a bit of time here let me introduce you to my made up meme for quilters:

What style of quilt piecing do you lean towards?
Sarah introduced me to wonky piecing last year through her flickr stream. At first I was put off by making everything not straight. Me being so anal retentive and everything has to be PERFECT, wonky piecing was hard for me. It's getting easier as I work more on it. Part of me hates to waste anything. There isn't that much waste with wonky piecing but there are a lot of itsy bitsy bits that are cut off and not use. I do like the look.
When shopping for fabric how do you choose that appeals to you?
Since I've been doing swaps for so long I've always been buying pieces of fabrics to make what I was making for the recipient. Now I'm buying with projects in mind and colour families. I just love colour and on any given fabric shopping day will buy a bunch of one colour family.

Who are your favorite fabric designers?
I mostly like scrap quilts. I won't go out and buy a whole line of someone's specific designer fabrics. I'll buy whatever floats my boat on any given day. I do get excited when I go to my little shop in Maine and find designer fabrics that sell online for buttloads of money for really cheap.

How do you quilt your quilts?
I started out tying quilts. I then tried hand quilting which I do not like. I like quick projects. In the past year I've been experimenting with machine quilting quilts. Fun. I'm not so sure though I'll be doing the free-motion thing again. That was a rough experience. My favorite go to for quilting is a grid. Just using painters tape and making lots of little lines all over the quilt. Like here . That was my favorite quilt and it wasn't recieved as warmly as I'd expected. This turned me off to the whole swapping of doll quilts thing. I've got two that I finished week and I'm done.

Who do you make your quilts for?
Everyone BUT me! I've been making so much for swaps for so long. Aaron has 2 from last year which I'm proud of.

Can you list how many projects are you working on right now?
Project improv
Pink and purple quilt ~needs more hand quilting, yuck
Houses quilt~ got bored of the design and will come back to it later
Pink squares ~I now have 210 squares for another version of this. I'm still deciding on how I want to do the tree blocks

What are your quilty plans for 2009?
Finish the above, naturally!
A pumpkin quilt for Aaron!
A purple quilt for my mom!

If you quilt, consider yourself tagged!!