Cut...cut...cut...stitch...stitch...stitch

Last Saturday several members of our local quilt guild got together and spent several hours cutting out and stitching quilt blocks. One of our local expert members taught us a new kind of quilt block dealing with color called Random Access.

The thing that makes it really neat is that you cut all your squares and triangles, sort them into paper bags and then stitch the pieces together in a given order, grabbing a piece out of the paper bag. All the colors are mixed in the bags and you randomly choose a piece and stitch it.

The rules: whatever color you choose out of the bag, you have to stitch - no fudging and looking for another color. There's no right or wrong color combination...each combination looks unique.

I was able to get all the parts and pieces cut for 20 blocks and 2 blocks stitched together, so now I just need to continue stitching and get the other 18 blocks finished. And my blocks look a little different than the others...I missed one set of directions and so there's more mixing of colors in my blocks. But they still turned out great!

It was fun getting together and sewing plus I learned several new things - one of which includes getting my finger out of the way of the needle!

I've sewn through my finger before, but never quite as bad as taking my hand away from the sewing machine and seeing a needle sticking out of both ends of my middle finger. Yep, right through the nail and everything. I would definitely advise against it.....it does not improve your stitching one single bit!