Catching up after a long absence - quilt, books and fabrics

It's been several weeks since I last posted on this blog but it does not mean I haven't been quilting.  In fact I have been working with a lot of fabric !
For those quilters who are familiar with Bonnie Hunter  it's well known that her patterns take a large amount of scraps and some of the blocks have many pieces which take a fair bit of time to make in spite of using quick piecing techniques.  And that's precisely what I have been doing.
The blocks are all done but not pieced together; so until that is done I will not post any pictures but here are a few clues; the colours I chose are very different from Bonnie's quilt, the pattern comes from one of her books and there are a lot of strings in the blocks....

To give myself a break from this quilt and also because I wanted to learn how to do a "faced binding" on a quilt I made this small quilt using an old charm pack and some other matching prints.

Then I loaded it on the long-arm and quilted it.  I'll be sending it to my mom.

Let me also tell you what else I have been doing;
Yesterday I went to see the Waverley Patchworkers Quilt Show.  They had a lot of varied and beautiful quilts. It was very inspiring to see all the quilts including the member's challenge display (see below, some of these). These girls are very creative and many have exhibited and won many prizes in the USA.

One of my small quilts has been featured in the latest Down Under Quits magazine.

   

I have taken advantage of a couple of book and fabric sales recently;

For sometime now I have been wanting to build up a collection of batiks so I started with this collection by Benartex  (Fossil Ferns) and a few others to supplement.
The box includes 90 fat quarters and I also got some other batiks.
I have a few projects in mind to use them but until then I am happy to feast my eyes on these beauties.

 

 

The books I got have some interesting projects as well as techniques to learn so I am looking forward to start one of the projects from the book 'Angles with Easy' and the ruler.

I am expecting to be very busy at work in the next two weeks so let's see how much I am going to achieve to be able to blog.