New quilt project and a new hobby!

Yay! Today and tomorrow are the monthly sewing days with Country School Quilters! I've got 2 quilt kits ready to go. Both of these are simple so I expect to get one finished and the second underway. Soon I'm going to have to get busy cutting out all the patriotic fabric that I bought in Paducah and get more kits ready.  Sometimes I take my sewing machine to the beach vacation and I'd need a project for that. But this year I have another plan!

I have had a small itch to try fly tying for a long time. After making those tedious ornaments for almost 30 years it seems like this is something I might be able to do. I've no interest at all in fly fishing and neither does Chris but his friend, Mike, loves fly fishing. He was visiting last week and I mentioned that I was interested. I even took him on a tour of my sewing supplies and we found some things that he could use. This week he sent me a tool kit and a kit to tie some flies! I'm taking this to the beach (with my crochet) instead of sewing. I've been watching a lot of YouTube videos to prepare and I'm excited to give this a try. I have no idea what I'll do with the flies but I can worry about that later.

Also related to beach planning is the quilt project that I started yesterday. I mentioned this one many weeks ago but it stayed on the back burner until I could finish the wedding quilt. My nephew requested this wall hanging for his music room and I'm going to try to get it done by next Saturday so I can deliver it to him at the beach. I didn't really want to make an exact quilt from this book but he fell in love with this one so I'm making it for him. I'm going to make my version wider, about 4 feet, by 3 feet tall.
​I got started yesterday.

I had about 3 yards of this fabric and the same of some black so I was ready to go. I've cut the fabric on both sides through the black area. I will not use the middle section at all.

If I had used the middle section I would have seamed it to have the center of my strip the bright yellow. Instead I just used the cut off edges, trimmed off what I didn't need and stitched the 2 long pieces together.

This fabric will be cut into 1" strips so I used a very tiny stitch length to, hopefully, keep the seams together as I piece it on the longarm. Remember when I made these placemats to practice longarm piecing?

Hey look! I emptied another cone of thread! I bought the Wonderfil in Paducah to try out. 
I am using black thread for this project because there really isn't a substitute for black thread on black fabric.

I added to wide pieces of black to each side of the center strip.
Yes, I could/should have pieced it as a tube like traditional Bargello.
Yes, the way I'm doing it is incredibly wasteful of fabric.
​That's just how it has to be. I have some sort of allergy to traditional Bargello. I did it once and hated it. I hated breaking apart the tube because I kept doing it wrong. The whole thing was exceedingly stressful.
I decided to just do it this way. It's more logical to me.

Next step is to cut this big piece into about 100 1" strips and then set up the longarm and plan the wave pattern and then just a lot of flip-and-sew on the longarm. I really don't think it's going to take an excessive amount of time but we'll see.