Celebrating Birthdays

My quilting buddy Karin from Life in the Slow Lane also celebrated her birthday this week. Her birthday was Saturday. (Happy Birthday, Karin! ) My MIL likes to send money for birthday gifts. I like to get "a little check" for my birthday. My birthday check was burning a hole in my pocket. A trip to Sweet Home Quilt Shop seemed a perfect match to purchase my own birthday gift. I e-mailed several other quilting friends suggesting a little shopping at Sweet Home on Saturday followed by lunch. Luckily for me, this idea also appealed to Karin and Kristie, M.S. Doolittle Quilter.

All three of us are planning to join in the fun of Bonnie Hunter's lastest mystery quilt, Christmas Lights in Quiltmaker magazine. With the help of shop owner Melisa and her staff, we searched for the perfect red, gold, green and black fabrics for each of our projects. I purchased a gold fabric and a red tone-on-tone to coordinate with a green and a black already in my stash.

This week I worked on my version of last year's mystery quilt Orange Crush (more on another post) I needed border fabric. Melisa and Kristie helped me select this wonderful blue dot fabric for the outer border. The black will be the inner border and the black and white stripe will work for bias binding.

Melisa showed us a sample she had finished using a Christmas charm pack. Kristie worked on her table-runner last Thimbles get together. I have several charm packs from an old Christmas line that I would love for a holiday table runner, so this lovely little pattern followed me home, too.

We went into the historic area of Conyers for lunch. We had great sandwiches and wonderful talking time. We were hungry. I didn't remember to take pictures of our sandwiches.