Quilty and non quilty goodness

I finally was able to get back to my sewing machine and make some progress on my value quit!  I started to sew my squares together to make half square triangles, and was getting incredibly antsy to see what my quilt was going to look like, so I sewed and cut and pressed about a third of the squares and used them to start playing around on my design wall, I couldn't resist! 

I was thinking I wanted to arrange my blocks this way, in squares, but after seeing it on the wall, I didn't think it showed off the differences in value as effectively as possible, and I can already see this being very difficult to get all the half squares to match up...

I think this does a much better job with the effect I was going for!  I'm love love loving it.  And, its much easier to to get the colors to line up right!  I'm excited to get more of this quilt completed!  I still need to square up my blocks, but I was just itchin to get this on the wall to see what it was going to look like.

In other non-quilty goodness...

Aside from quilting and sewing, I discovered knitting last year as well.  Now, as of right now, I can only knit things in straight lines, no increasing, decreasing or knitting in the round, so I'm pretty much limited to scarves.  Which is fine by me! 

I love that knitting is so portable, so its the perfect vegging in front of the tv, or sitting in the waiting room project.  I've been working on this for the past few weeks anytime that I was just sitting around.  (I also find that it deters the night-time tv munchies, because your hands are occupied!)

I love this yarn, so so pretty.  Very easy to make and such a bold effect!  The secret is finding the graduated (spelling??) yarn that gradually changes from color to color- I made one of these scarves last year for myself with expensive yarn from a yarn shop, but imagine my surprise when I found that Lion Brand now makes yarn like this on one of my weekly Joann trips!  If you buy two different skeins of different colors and then stripe them every two rows, you get something like this beauty.  

 

I like to get one skein of a bright bold combination and then a skein of something a little more neutral ( my neutral here was a skein of variegated greens) to make sure the outcome isn't too wild.

Anyways, I'm off to enjoy football Sunday, go Steelers!  More progress to come on the Value quilt soon...