Alas, my vacation time has come to an end. I am grateful to have plenty of quilts waiting for me. Before we get into that, let's look at what I've sewn this month.
I've finished all the spire pieces for the Linda J. Hahn Beach Bumz project. I like that you can chain-piece these foundations. I don't love tracing them from stencils.
I took the time to grade the seams so that I won't have dark blue shadows (hopefully). Can you see it in the photo below?
I alternated trimming the Magnificent mystery blocks with piecing the Beach Bumz spires. There were 16 spires in all. They are all fully trimmed but I haven't removed the foundation yet. Linda says to leave the foundation in. I don't want to because you can see my lines through some of the fabrics I used and the foundations still have the faintest smoke smell.
I have been hard at work on the Magnificent mystery pieces too. There is sooo much trimming of blocks for this quilt. I have all of month three (large hourglass blocks) completed. I did month four (Irish chain) ages ago. I am part way through month five, which is smaller hourglass blocks. The blocks are all made now and I am working on trimming them. 
After they are all trimmed, another piece of background fabric gets sewn to one side. I haven't started months six or seven yet. The final design is revealed in February. I took the sneak peek, so I know what I'm sewing. Here's all the pieces of my project, minus the backing.
I put off working on this project for a while because I really dislike making hourglass blocks. They rarely come out with all four corners exact. I purchased some marking tools. It was a fail. Can you see how the marks were larger than 1/4"? In the end I just went back to using the markings on my machine and took care not to let the edges pull in towards the needle at the end.
Back to the quilting work...I got off to a slow start, realizing I needed to spend a day doing design work, tracking down quilts and setting up appointments and so on. I got the first quilts on the frames yesterday.
Toni picked Dragonfly Dance for her quilt. 
Ann K. requested Cakewalk 2 for this comfort quilt. I'll add her binding to the front so she can stitch it down when I ship it back. 
In other quilting news, I attended the big guild meeting last night for the first time since last August. I donated the race car quilt! Woo hoo, it's gone!
I've been working on my knitted blanket too. I've finished four skeins, but made some mistakes that I need to fix. I have one missed stitch for sure that's about four rows down and it looks like I dropped a stitch in the same row too, but I can't find proof of it. I'm hoping to work on the repairs tonight.
Finally, I don't normally take pictures of most of our food, but I was chatting with my sister and sent her a picture of my dinner. The recipe for Better-Than-Takeout Cashew Chicken can be found here. It's so good. When we have it for dinner, we usually serve it with rice. When I eat the rest as a leftover, I often just eat it as-is. Let me know if you try it. 
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