Flowering snowball quilt

This year has been a year of firsts with my quilting, I joined an online bee, I learnt how to paper piece and then I decided to join my first quiltalong. It was with Mary of Molly Flanders Makerie and it was the Flowering snowball quilt.
This called for curved piecing (also a first) and now I am at the quilting phase and I am hand quilting(also my first large project to be hand quilted).

I chose this red check I had in my stash for the backing, it really adds to the cottage feel of the quilt, I think.

My attempt at quilting with Perle cotton, I am ok with the front but the stitches on the back are so small, I can't seem to get the angle right

 

Anyway, even with flaws, I love the way this looks, I just went with a plain white 5 inch border all round to increase the size of the quilt.

 

Material Obsession

Well, last weekend I had the great pleasure of taking a short trip to the most wonderful quilting shop in Sydney, Material Obsession.
I always get a little overwhelmed when I visit there because every fabric is worthy of a quilt and I just can't make any choices.
Anyway to make it easy for myself I found some little bags of scraps, they were basically organised by colours and at $5 each, I bought 3.
To my immense glee I found that one of the packs I had bought which was a neutral looking bag from the outside, contained some of the most gorgeous fabrics I had ever seen. Some Tula pink and Sarah Watts (even though I did not know who she was before, I certainly do now!)

I decided to challenge myself and with each pack I am going to see how many blocks I can make.

Here is the progress so far with the first bag.

 

And here are the scraps I have left. Still have enough for a few more blocks, I think.

 

 

Now all I have to do is decide how I am going to use the blocks