More Tiling and a Book Giveaway

For details on the book giveaway,  just scroll to the bottom!

I've been talking about designing tiling designs in the workshop my mom and I took with Jenny Bowker.  Since then I've been working on actually turning one of my designs into a quilt.

These are the tile designs I started with.  I drew them to be as similar as possible except one has the dragon head and one has his tail.

Here's the computer mockup of what they look like tiled.  Again, sorry for the awful colors, it's just an attempt to get an idea.

I decided I'd make mine fusible applique and zig-zag around the edges with invisible thread.  Jenny encouraged me to make the blocks quite large (~16") since they're pretty detailed and would have more visual impact if they were larger, but I really really wanted to use up the little bitty pieces of fabric I had left from cutting out the animals in these two quilts.  It was really a lot of fabric, all with fusible already on it, but small weirdly shaped pieces.  As a result my blocks are about 11" (finished).  That really is too small, but I'm persevering!  Here are the blocks-  they'll be on a darker background and right now they don't line up right.  Hopefully this is because they each have a bunch of seam allowance (which will be turned under), but I think lining them up will be tricky.  I think they'll be more dramatic once I've quilted them, and the dragons definitely need eyes, probably a bead, but I'm liking them so far.

And now for the giveaway.  A long while back, a call for submissions came out for quilts to be included in a book called 1000 Quilt Inspirations: Colorful and Creative Designs for Traditional, Modern, and Art Quilts  My mom and I were both lucky to have quilts accepted into it, and after many months, hard copies finally arrived.  It's full of wonderful quilts,  definitely super inspiring eye candy.  A couple of things I really like, one is that (as the name suggests) it contains really a wide variety of different types of quilts.  The second is that it contains lots and lots of detail shots, so you can see up close what people have done or stitched.   I'm giving away a copy, just leave a comment below and I'll use random.org to draw a name on the afternoon of Friday May 1st.  Any kind of comment is fine, if you feel like it, tell me whether you're a pet person and if so, what kind of pets you have.

And of course, always linking up to Nina-Marie.