WIP Wednesday: Bows and sews

Two things that are always good, but even better when combined: crafty friends and long weekends.  Both of them are gifts that keep on giving.  With long weekends, you get the week beforehand to look forward to having Monday off, then the actual holiday, and then the shorter workweek immediately following.  So what is technically eight hours of flex holiday on my timesheet is actually two weeks of morale boosting.

And crafty friends are even better.  Friends in general are awesome, of course.  Someone to chat with, laugh with, go to the movies and eat froyo with.  But if you also have someone to click needles with, well then!  Not only a companion who understands your frogging frustrations, but because no two crafters are exactly alike, someone who can also teach you something new.

I did get some work done on my Bow Peep's Black Sheep, but while it's still soft and chic, it's just not as exciting as having done my first real amount of machine sewing.  All thanks to two of my friends who quilt.  We spent two days out of the three-day weekend sewing, watching British comedies, and noshing.  It was exactly what I needed to go from a theory of a subway-tiled quilt out of Jay McCarroll fat quarters to my first sewn cowl and a lot of progress on the front of that quilt-to-be.

After ironing, I cut each of my fat quarters were cut into 4x6" bricks:

Then I used my friend's handy dandy new design board to mock up my quilt.  Each brick of fabric just sort of sticks to the matting on the board, so I was able to make sure that I mixed up all of the prints appropriately and play around with the dimensions of width and height:

I ended up with 19 rows with 10 bricks each.  I took the bricks sticking out on the righthand side and cut them in half to go back to the start of the same row.

Then it was time to actually sew!  I powered through eight rows before it was time to pack things up for the night:

I'm seriously considering invading my friend's house again this weekend to try and get the other eleven rows pieced together.  Being in the middle of a step in the process is nagging at me.  But once that is done, I'm sure I'll be feeling cautious and worried about moving onto the next step.  I always get comfortable with each step and become paranoid that I'll have problems with the next one.  Hopefully it will always be 'the next step' where the trouble lies.

This is why I need crafty friends, for the moral support to push me from one step to the next.  And to ring out a cow bell on their iPhones whenever I finish something.

For more WIP Wednesday posts, check out Tami's Amis; but first, tell me: How did you spend your long weekend?  Spend any time crafting with friends?  What have they helped you do to expand your repertoire?