Wow that's too bad your machine is in the shop, I really understand about it driving you up the wall to be without it. I am glad you liked the hand bags! They were a blast to make! I was busy yesterday, I managed to get the 165 blocks for my son's special quilt sewn with the X design they needed before I was able to sew together two rows of the blocks to make the start of the actual rag quilt he and I are making together. He has autism, and so that's why I chose the fabrics I did.

Here is my set up with the blue blocks on the desk being sewn with X's. I like to chain stitch them, much easier IMO.



Here's the pile of blocks I cut out this weekend, there's a layer of denim in the middle peeking out to help it rag and bloom nicely, as well as adding a little extra warmth to it:



And here's my blocks cut and assembled, and ready to sew X's on:



I have a pretty complex (for me anyway for my first and second attempted quilts) pattern to work with, each of my blocks is denim, leopard flannel on the other outside and brown flannel on the inside peeking out:



It will end up looking like this:



I am really enjoying sewing, only been at it for a LONG time, mostly by hand, used a machine in high school and used my mother's old singer before that as a girl making doll clothes. But this machine, the Necchi Supernova, MAN it's a DREAM machine!! So loving using it. It was my mother's husband's mother's. And it has the cams to do the decorative stitches and the buttonhole cam wrench to do those too! I haven't had the nerve yet to attempt those things with it, but I definitely appreciate it's raw power. What kind of machine do you and your DW have Dr. Smith? LOVE the name btw, he was always my fav character on Lost in Space too.