February Take It Further Challenge Progress Report

You may (or may not!) recall that the concept challenge for this month was "What are you old enough to remember?" You can read my initial thoughts on the topic here. I've had a pretty clear idea of how I wanted to portray Lady Bird Johnson's vision and I finally got some work done to that end. First, I pieced my ground:

Then I started beading to represent the bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush that are native to the Hill Country of Texas. There's another species of flower I wanted to include but the beads I have in-house are not giving me the effect I want. I'm not confident my local bead shops will have anything better so I went online and ordered the shape I want. However, the color I was counting on doesn't seem to be available so I may have to relinquish that point. We'll see. At this point I think I'm going to put this aside until those beads arrive and go back to my Gemini journal quilt for the Bead Journal Project.

I made a free-pieced house block for Bonnie's housewarming party over at Quiltville's Quips & Snips but I was so anxious to get it in the mail that I forgot to photograph it before I mailed it! I made her a scrappy signature block and cut a strip from one of my uglier fabrics for her too (per Tonya's suggestion). Then, while I had the bright scraps out, I played around for awhile and did some random piecing. I don't know whether they will end up as official crumb blocks or something else but it was fun to do for a change of pace. It was hard to put those scraps away to get back to the work of the challenge pieces!