Took my Embroidery Machine to Japan ...........

Well not literally to Japan but did work on some great Japanese Sashiko design that turned out awesome! Here are some pictures for you to judge for yourself:

Next steps is to bring these squares with me to my Open Sew at Eddies on Wednesday and decide how to put them together to make a quilt.

New quilt project - Nickel Bricks

Last week there as a post on the HGTV quilting message board wondering what the following pattern was:

My good buddy Trish, responded with posting the pattern from the book Loose Change and the pattern was called Nickel Bricks.

I then read the post and started to chuckle as I had cut out this pattern a while back and started working on it but then got distracted with my Scraps to Treasures challenge quilt and had totally forgotten about it. I resurrected the fabric to see where I had left off and began working on it. At the end of the first day I had all the single blocks completed:

And one test of what a four block will look like:





The next day my friend Cynthia was coming by for a sewing day and all the single blocks became twos and then fours. This is what is currently on my design wall:



I really like how it is shaping up as I love batik and black together. As tomorrow is a Football Sunday I think this is the project I will work on and hopefully will get all the rows put together. Stay tuned for an updated photo!

One question I am mulling over in my mind is which way to finish the quilt. As you can see in the first two pictures each of them have a different boarder. The top one has a plain black border and the one in the book had a piano key style border. I have the batik fabric cut out but still need to cut the black if I go with the piano key option. Decision, decisions!