December "doings"

I'm finally going to reveal my big project tomorrow, but I have a few small things to share today.  Along with my Quilty 366 blocks, I have a few other scrappy projects on the go.  Some of them make great leader / ender projects, which in turn end up in scrappy donation quilts.  But I discovered a new project a few days ago, and I'm really excited about it!
If you're Canadian, you'll know that Canada will be celebrating it's 150 "birthday" next July 1st.  To mark this momentous occasion, there are a number of quilting projects / challenges popping up.  I had already heard about "Canada's Big Quilt Bee" - a project that aims to collect 1,000 quilts for kids at Ronald McDonald houses across Canada.  I've already started piecing a few slab blocks for that.  But a fellow blogger mentioned a new endeavor - 150 Canadian Women, and I'm so excited to be one of the many Canadian quilters that will be producing great quilts, but also learning something about 150 women that were an integral part of forming the fabric of Canada!  Unfortunately, I missed out on the introduction of this project, so I've missed the first 2 weeks of pattern releases, but I downloaded blocks 7-9, and stitched them up yesterday afternoon.  I shared this project at our guild meeting last night, and it sounds like a few more of our members are going to sign up for this great challenge.
Here are blocks 7-9:

The bottom block represents Viola Desmond, who was just chosen to be the first Canadian woman depicted on a Canadian bill - the $10. bill in this case.  She's often referred to as Canada's Rosa Parks.

As this was our last guild meeting before Christmas, we were encouraged to bring a small, wrapped gift for a game we played.  I thought of a number of gift ideas, and then remembered the box of Dresden plate "blades" that I came across last week.  I hadn't done anything with them after I cut them, so I sewed them together into a rectangle, and made 2 mug rugs from them.   This was a great way to use up some scrap fabrics, and make something useful for this time of year!  (the bottom one seems to have a wavy right side, but that's just an optical illusion!) 

I'm going to share these projects with Cynthia's Oh Scrap! blog post, as well as Leanne's Scraptastic 

Tuesday link-up.

Hope to see you tomorrow!