Penguin eyes and a baby blanket

Chris is away on a ski trip and I was going to have the whole weekend to myself for making stuff and it almost worked out that way. My brother and his partner are trying to move to Richmond to be closer to her family and apparently the market here is on fire and houses are selling fast. Wwhen she finds one she either gets her daughter or me to go look at them and that's what I got to do Saturday afternoon. I enjoy looking at houses so I don't mind at all. I take video tours to send to her so she can see a walk through of the house. Of course there are things that I miss (what kind of stove does it have) but also things that don't show in the photos (desperate need for gutters). It was fun and I look forward to the next one. It's so much less stress when it's not your money!

I did get a few things done though. This is not the postage stamp quilt like it's supposed to be. I had planned to baste the postage stamp but I realized that I need to get black batting. Since the Mid-Atlantic quilt festival is next week I'll pick it up then. Meanwhile I loaded this little quilt that Mom and I are making for a surprise gift. I'll tell you all about it Wednesday.

I started making penguin eyes. I thought the penguin quilt would be fast because the bodies are so big and there are only 20 of them.....but I missed the tiny penguin faces. Lots of 1 - 1.5" pieces to cut and sew for those and I'm having seam allowance size challenges.

I also finished the second crochet blanket. These things are really addictive and I find that I'm watching too much TV just so I can sit and do this. Hopefully I'll be over this soon and will save most of this for car and airplane rides. But I'm really pleased with the way it turned out. 

The yarn is this Mandala and it used 2 balls to make a blanket about 30" square. This yarn is sooooo soft. To get the symmetry patterning I started the first ball from the outside and the second from the middle. 

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I did a border on this one just to try it out. It took 2 tries to get it right but I'm happy with it in the end. Crochet is so much easier to undo than stitching. 

I have 2 more balls of this yard for another blanket and I'll splice in the leftover yarn into that one. I do not want to start creating a yarn scrap bag.

I think my third blanket is going to be a giant granny square.