I finally got off my duff and made some progress on my Dresden Plate quilt.  I’ve got all the blades assembled into their appropriate configurations: 2 full plates, 4- 3/4 plates, 4 half plates, and 4 quarter plates.  That mix of sizes will all make sense once I have the top put together, I promise.  I’m currently working on getting the centers put together for the various plate sizes, which is interesting since some are supposed to look like flowers and some are just decorative border pieces.

I’ve got my stem and leaf fabric picked out, and need to finalize my leaf shape and get it sketched and sized right.  I think I’m using a leaf shape from a picture I took on a nature walk with the kids a couple months ago, so I’ll need to transform that from picture to line drawing to do it.

I’m also piecing the background so it’ll be more interesting than a solid piece of fabric, so those are my leaders and enders as I’m fiddling with the rest of these pieces.

Jett, as you can imagine, is all over this entire project. Literally.  The full Dresden centers and plates themselves are in the lower right of that picture, and his head is on the stem & leaf fabric.

When I haven’t been fiddling with Dresden plates, I finished up the second pumpkin for my kids’ school auction. For the uninitiated, it’s a Minion from the movie “Despicable Me”.  It’s mostly painted, although the goggles are mason jar rings with some template plastic behind it so the LED candle inside it will shine through.  He’s got pipe cleaner hair, duct tape goggle straps, and felt gloves.

Well, I’m almost done with my seekrit quilt, which will probably be revealed in the next couple weeks once I get the go-ahead from the pattern designer.  In the mean time, Jett is acting as my censor.

I’ve also been cutting for a NEW mystery project (same pattern designer), and another Mystery project, courtesy of Sandy’s guildmate, which is called Scrapitude. And after I do the test pattern for this next quilt, I’ll work on my Dresden Plates and a test bag.

In other crafty news, I finished the first class pumpkin for my kids’ school auction! Each class gets a sucker volunteer to decorate a fauxkin.  This particular one is for my daughter’s 2nd grade class. For those lucky enough to have no idea what this it, it’s a Creeper from Minecraft.

For reference, here’s what the Creeper looks like in the game. Basically, I painted a lot of green squares to mimic the 8-bit graphics. I had tried to use a template for the squares, but pumpkins are not exactly flat so I ended up free-handing the squares.  The eyes and mouth are backed by an old piece of x-ray film (a chest x-ray, if you care - good news! I didn’t have pneumonia!), and there’s a flickery LED candle inside.  As I told the teacher this morning when I took it to the classroom, a pumpkin needs a light inside it to be a jack-o-lantern, otherwise, it’s just a gourd.