WIP Wednesday: The Calm Before the Storm

I now know the true meaning of the phrase "not enough hours in the day." Because, for real, there aren't. With my Sewing Summit teaching gig coming up and a million other things floating around in my head, my to-do list is never-ending! But I think I've been remarkably calm in the face of it. Just taking it one day at a time, doing what I can, and not freaking out. Yay me. : )

 This week I mostly worked on a baby quilt for a friend who's expecting a girl, after two boys. I was kind of at a loss about the design of this quilt until I came across this cute paper-pieced block. It's actually a traditional block from the book The Quilter's Album of Patchwork Patterns by Jinny Beyer, and I drafted the paper-piecing pattern for it myself. Yet another example of a traditional block that I would have sworn was modern. : )

The official name of the block is "Rainbow," but since that's hardly an appropriate name for this particular quilt, I'm thinking of calling it "Cartwheels." Baby's not due quite yet, so I'm bringing this little quilt to Sewing Summit to use as a sample in the Foundation Paper Piecing class that I'm teaching with Elizabeth.

Speaking of Sewing Summit, a few other class samples are on my to-do list as well. In case you haven't noticed, I looooove paper-piecing, so I'm all dorky-excited about showing people what they can do with this technique! And I'm thinking a little of Sweetwater's new collection Mama Said Sew will have to make its way into at least one of my samples. (It's in stock at Pink Castle ... go and get it!)

Last but not least, I signed a contract today to speak about "Modern Quilting and the Online Quilting Community" at a traditional quilt guild meeting in May. Gulp. I'm excited, but also nervous about it already! Between this and teaching at Sewing Summit, I'm thinking a public-speaking class might not be a bad idea ...

So what are you working on this week? Here are the linky rules:

1. Link up any post from the past week that features at least one unfinished work-in-progress (WIP).
2. Somewhere in your post, you must link back here to my blog. (Or grab my WIP Wednesday button for your sidebar.)
3. Comment on at least a few of the other WIP Wednesday links. Because what fun is a linky party without comments? : )

Happy Wednesday, everybody!