Small group challenge

My small group meets weekly at various member's homes.  We quilt, knit, embroidery, shop hop, eat and gab. We frequently challenge ourselves and this year the challenge is to finish, finish, finish!  We all have a lot of WIPs (works in progress) and we want to finish them up.  A WIP is any project where fabric has been cut. Patterns, fabric, or ideas don't qualify, you have to have actually cut fabric.  So here is my list of WIPs:

1. Arizona Beauty - needs border
2. Turquoise and brown batiks - fabric cut
3. Koi and lotus - needs border
4. Triple 9 patch - needs border
5. Floribunda baskets - applique blocks
6. Primitive stars - applique blocks
7. Friendship blocks - sashing and border 
8. Brown Paisley - fabric cut

For me, I have decided to finish them to the top stage for 2 reasons.  I have a limited mount of room to store quilts and, since many of these don't have a home yet, I am going to wait to complete them until they have a destination. And 2: Time; I don't like constantly switching from piecing to quilting on the same machine - I want to sit down and piece, or quilt without all the adjusting. So these will wait until I have a dedicated quilting machine or until I save the funds to have them long arm quilted. So to get got up, here are the first 3 done for the year.....

Teal and brown batik - I have been collecting these beauties for several years and had the Hip to Be Square pattern all picked out. I will have to practice my picture taking!

This has been in the works for years. I paper pieced the flowers and then got stuck on the border. I want to quilt koi swimming behind the flowers, in pink thread so they really stand out. Unfortunately, my machine quilting  isn't good enough yet to create what I see in my head - I will be doing a lot of practicing before I quilt this. I plan to quilt the koi out into the borders and bind in the same pink and black floral that is in the blocks.

This is a New York beauty pattern from Valorie Wells. I made it a little bigger and opted for a simple border. The original has a plaid border but everything I tried just made the quilt seem too busy to me. I decided to go ahead and quilt this one soon so it will get posted again when it is truly done.