My Block of the month

After a few years of patchworking, I finally found a block of the month project that I liked enough to actually buy into long term, and it turns out my good friend Ally was also under its spell.
As we're both Mums of new babies this year, it's a huge challenge we accepted together. It has been a lot of fun racing the clock to both get the blocks progressing, and I can't believe our boys will be about 1 year old when we finish this quilt. It's one with a lot of love sewn in!

She has shown her progress at her blog Sunshine and Stitching, and I thought I'd better share my progress with you too!

The design is by Lenora Jenkins and is supposed to look like this in the end...

Cute Huh?
From Gum Valley Patchwork, Australia

Block one.... from humble beginnings:

came completion of this:

Block two is coming along slowly, I've still got about a week til crunch time when block 3 is expected to pounce into my letter box :-)

The embroidered words this month are "Love" and "Hope".
Love is done, Hope still has half a dove to go, but on track.
I cut a piece of fabric off which APPARENTLY was needed to frame "hope" ...I think I still have the scrap of fabric which didn't look important at the time, and I'm just waiting for the universe to give it back ;-)

So far this quilt has enabled me to learn two new skills: Needleturn applique and chain stitch embroidery stitch.
I also used a clever way of getting a perfect circle SUPER easy to applique that I stole from http://youtu.be/8ChE9UBWA8A