I was talking with my mom a few weeks ago when she told me about

's Trip Around the World Challenge Facebook group. Although I do have a few projects in progress, I'm always keen to start something new and this challenge gives me enough external motivation to stick with it. We hung up the phone and I was already pulling fabrics out of my stash. Despite bringing quite a lot of fabric back from Japan, I have a lot of small quantities so it wasn't easy to decide what to use. I spread out all of my favorites and played around with them for hours. I was about to give up when I decided just to take the top fabrics off the pile.

I wasn't convinced that I had picked the best fabrics but I am enjoying how they all come together. The piece grew steadily at first and after finishing row 5, I was on a roll! As I have gotten further through the rounds though, I've gotten busier and seem to have less and less time to dedicate to my project each evening.

I've got 8 rows down now and I'm just itching to pick out the fabrics for the next assignment, rows 10-18. We have a bit less time to finish these first assignments than I was counting on, but I'm still optimistic. It's obviously called a challenge for a reason.