The start of the 2012 charity quilt...

Remember that charity quilt that I took down to the wire last year? The one with the frogs?  Well, I volunteered to do another one for this July.  And, once again, time is slipping away.  This weekend, I finally started on it.  Or, more accurately, I finally started on the sewing part of it.

Several weeks before Christmas, I noticed that the local Hancock Fabrics store was going out of business.  And, I thought I had a plan and a theme for this year's charity quilt, so I went ahead and bought fabric for the charity quilt.  While I got the fabric pre-washed, it has pretty much just sat, waiting for me to go the pieces I needed for the design.  I had planned on appliqueing hand prints on to the fabric.  I was very ambitious:  I wanted hand prints from both males and females from infants to the elderly.  Unfortunately, after sending out requests, I still only had five hand prints.

Then, yesterday, an idea struck while Geff and I were in JoAnn's Fabric store.

For Christmas, Geff had gotten me one of these handy-dandy little machines:

It uses die cuts to let you cut fabric fast and accurately.

JoAnn's Fabric store had the die cuts, and they were 25% off.  I suddenly had a new theme.  And, all it took was a new die that would let me create flowers like this...

And, this...

(Yes, you can see another flower behind this one...I managed to finish seven blocks so far...)

And, since it would look funny to have all the flowers look alike, I did draw up a tulip pattern that allowed me to create the next two blocks...

This is going to be fun!