What a Swell Time!

Ahhhh.....there's not too many things closer to a quilters heart than a few straight days of sewing with friends and not having to cook/clean/step&fetch. Call it immersion quilting - sewing saturation - quality time with a warm machine. LOL - whatever, it's my far and away my favorite escape. I took a large box of pre-cut pieces and made 11 more 16 inch blocks for what I'm now calling Paintbox. That green sure did something to it, just not quite sure what:

Sorta hurts the eyes, doesn't it? This is scrap wranglin' at it's finest; I don't pay attention to what goes with what. My darling friend Mavis who is utterly coordinated to the MAX kept trying to re-arrange pieces, saying "you have 2 greens here" or "Do you really want that many blues?" I love her to bits. By the last morning she was taking pictures and swearing she wanted to make one just like it.
I also took this opportunity to try my hand at teeny minis - paper pieced of course, and 3 inch finished.

The angel who arranges these trips and does all the work is Kerrie Hershey, owner of Kerries Quilting in Lakeport, CA. She gave me the best best best paper piecing tip I've ever learned. That thread cutting feature on my machine (that I thought was worthless) is the BOMB for paper piecing!! No 1000 miles of threads all over the place. She also pulled my name to win the neatest new cutter:

How cool is that? The picture doesn't show it as cool as it really is. Olfa is testing the water with these, and have only made 2 colors so far apparently, purple and orange. Ironically, the morning before the drawing I had relieved the LQS of 5 or 6 yards of assorted oranges. Spooky, huh? Like I have POWERS? (snicker snicker)
The scraps I trimmed off the Paintbox blocks made a little Broken Dishes quiltlet, NOT pp.

Those HSTs finished at an inch and a quarter. WAY small for me. I seem to be getting sucked into a leeetle bitty vortex - is there treatment for this???
For the 5th time I won the award for Most $$ dropped at the LQS. Sigh. Where's the competition???? Somebody put up a struggle! I'll show you the loot later, right now I have to go catch up on what's happening in blogland. Toodles!