Another doll quilt or mini quilt

I really enjoy reading and posting on "The Quilting Board" website. I have learned alot, shared alot and also met new great friends.  There is always some type of Round Robin, Boomerang Swap or Doll Quilt Swap going on to particpate in.  I really enjoy the Doll Quilt swaps. 

The theme for January's swap was "where your from".  My partner is in FL which is great since that is where I was born and lived most of my life.  We are both still working on our projects but should be done before the end of January.    I live just north of Charlotte, NC and first thought of doing a mini quilt that would show alot of NASCAR themes since we are in the heart of NASCAR.  But that just didn't seem quite right so, I kept thinking and decided on the Blue Ridge Mountains.  So this will be my first try at and Landscape type art quilt.  I had plenty of blue fabrics and just started laying them out together to get an idea
of how it would look.  Here is a picture of my first "draft"

Then I kept playing with ideas and this is what it ended up looking like!

It isn't the greatest but I can kinda proud of it!

I hope my partner likes this!  Her daughter lives on the eastern coast of NC.

First Quilt of 2012

I really need to get back into posting on my blog a bit more regular.  I may make that my New Year's resolution even if it is a bit late.  Better late than never I guess. 

Cold winter weather is a great time or excuse to stay inside and work on one quilt project or another. This weekend it definitly got cold.  Saturday morning it was down to 21 degrees brrrr!   Over the Christmas and New Year's holiday, I had eight days off from work and took full advantage of that time to start a new quilt project.    I had bought several fat quarters awhile back just because I liked the colors and they were on sale.  Never can pass up a fabric sale.   Here are the fat quarters I started with.

I couldn't decide on what pattern to do with these so I went thur just about every quilting magazine and book looking for just the right pattern.  Then I came across a copy of a pattern I had done one before.  It is called Five Friends and was in a book with patterns to use with jelly rolls.  Once I got started I decided that this quilt would be for my sister in law since her birthday was January 7th.    I really think that the colors all turned out pretty good.  I really like it.

the back of the quilt using left over scraps

Now I just need to quilt it all together.  Now sure how I am going to quilt it though. Don't really want to ditch stitch or just meandor around. Any ideas??