.: Hottie Challenge + do.GoodStitches :.

A beautiful wintery day in Brisbane today - it felt a little more like August, around Ekka time, since it was pretty windy too.

I finished my Hottie Challenge at last - it will hit the express-post-mail on Monday to the gorgeous Cam.  There have been so many wonderful hotties popping up in Cam's instagram photos, I can't wait to see pics of all of them at the exhibition - over 100 people are out there making hotties!! 

I kept changing my mind about how to approach the hottie, but finally decided on the leafy heart, filled in with hot pink flowers.  That wasn't quite busy enough for me, so I snipped out little letters spelling 'breathe'.  They're all made from wool felt and stitched on with perle 8 thread.  

I think the white spot/grey background is from Stof, and the binding has two of Cam's Curly Pops fabrics, and a knitty-fabric, which I think is by Timeless Treasures or Michael Miller.  

I had quite a few false starts with the hottie-opening - I started with binding, switched to pom-poms, changed again to ribbon, then tulle, and then had the light-bulb moment to stitch flowers on top of the tulle!!  I do love it - it makes me think of an old-fashioned shower-cap. 

On the back is one of our Spoonflower panels - Vee and I call this one 'Cam', since it features a quote from Cam on Modern Family (I cut the words off, but they say "I can't turn it down, it's who I am" - they're from the very first episode).

I'm going to stitch on a couple more flowers tonight, to cover up the start/end of the binding, I think.

And then this afternoon, I started and finished my first two blocks for the CARE group of do.GoodStitches.  The blocks are based on Amy Stitchery Dickory Dock's Garden Lattice tutorial. 

I was so happy to join a do.GoodStitches group.  do.GoodStitches was founded a few years ago by Rachel from Stitched in Colour (you can read a whole lot of Rachel's posts about it here).  It is a virtual quilting bee that makes quilts for charity, and has a 'home base' on Flickr  - there are many different groups (or 'circles'), and each group has its own 'check in' page on Flickr.  

All the do.GoodStitches groups make quilts, each month, for charity.  There are quilters and sew-ers in each group (I am very definitely a sew-er!).  The quilters take it in turns to choose blocks for everyone to sew - which they are then responsible for sewing up into a quilt - and I think they also choose the charity that will receive the quilt.  Our group is called CARE.  This month (my first month in CARE - I'm taking someone's place), we all followed the Garden Lattice tutorial using fabrics from our own stash.  The fabrics for this month had to be greys and yellows that were unisex, but most likely for a boy. 

I'm hoping to find time tomorrow to sew up my AusModBee blocks for this month, so they are all finished and posted before the school holidays start.   Vee and I have a couple of printing days this week too, so there will be plenty of behind-the-scenes panel-cutting-and-ironing going on too. 

Enjoy the rest of your weekend.  xoxo cat