WARNING: Quilting can seriously affect your health ..

No, it really can.  Last week my shoulder was sore, in fact it was more than sore.  I could hardly move it and when I turned over in my sleep the pain woke me up (you can imagine how happy I was!).  It was like I had pulled a muscle or sprained it but I couldn't think of anything I had done to cause it.  I couldn't sew for a few days (so that certainly didn't help on the happy stakes!) and then on Friday I thought I HAD to do something so I thought I'd just cut some scraps into 2" squares.  The second I went to cut I realised what had cause my sore shoulder - rotary cutting.  Not just normal rotary cutting - I've since figured out rotary cutting with a very blunt blade!!!!  So take the advice of Ms Lottie which I recently read over here and change your cutting blade.  It now feels like a hot knife through butter - bliss!

I managed to do some sewing yesterday and made up the blocks for Kellie for her month in the Australasian Bee.  She asked for a block, or two, of quilt as you go, as shown in the this tutorial.

You can see that I got so carried away with the lovely, gorgeous fabrics that I left very little room for the border - ooops!  Kellie had fussy cut the squares for the centre and then it was literally place and quilt.

A little tip for you if you are going to try this technique:

if you are using white as the border colour 

make sure you trim the second to last round of fabric very neatly and as small as possible 

so that it doesn't show through the white.  

Something I learnt the hard way!!!!!

And best of all for me?  The very lovely Kellie said we could keep the scraps - and she sent quite a bit of material.  Lucky, lucky me!

I LOVED making these blocks - very satisfying and quite quick (although if you were organising all the materials and batting it would take that much longer).  This is what I'm really enjoying about the quilting bees over on flickr - being introduced to new techniques and trying blocks and colour combinations you wouldn't necessarily do yourself.  You also get to 'meet' some great people!