Vacation Mini-Book

Remember the Vacation Book I was planning on working on during our trip? Well, I actually did work on it quite a bit during the amazing amount of driving that we did. After we got home, all I really needed to do was a little bit of journaling and then add pictures after they got developed. I'm actually quite happy with the finished product--it's just a jumble of stuff--but I love the memories. The only problem? I stuffed way too many pictures in it, and now my rings are too small. I'll need to get some that are a little bigger.

Dear Jane Progress

Spending 30+ hours in the car in one week, one would think I could finish more than 6 blocks, but hey, six blocks is six blocks. I think they are turning out well. These are mostly applique. The two blocks that I pieced in this set are hand-pieced, which I enjoy, but it's not my method of choice simply because of the time factor. I'm excited to try some of the machine-pieced and paper-pieced blocks. I cut the background squares for the applique blocks a little larger than the 5" finished size I needed because I know applique sometimes causes a block to shrink a little. I will trim them down before piecing them together. I wish I would have thought of this when preparing the hand-pieced blocks. I would have cut those squares a little bigger as well and trimmed them down after completing the applique on them. I think they actually turned out REALLY close to the right size, so I won't redo. Anyway, hooray for getting started!