The last fabric purchase of '08...

I dragged Mom to the local quilt shop (maybe that's too strong -- she goes willingly now) just before I left town the other day. The store had relocated since the last time I'd visited from a tiny, cramped dark house not without its charm but a little depressing to the spacious old pharmacy up the street. Now it's bright and airy, and it looks like they've doubled, if not tripled, their inventory. The staff even seems more buoyant, the quilts on the walls cheerier.

I could live there now, right over under the blues and purples...maybe move over by the greens every once in a while for a change of season. Put the piano in the corner with the blacks and whites and hope they won't notice.

There was SO much great fabric, it was a little overwhelming. Faced with so many fantastic options, the project ideas just start rushing into my head and I get a little tipsy thinking about all the possibilities.

Who needs alcohol when fabric can do the trick? Not necessarily a cheaper addiction, but it's much easier on the liver.

They've always had a great collection of Kaffee Fassett fabrics, and it looks like Westminster has jumped on the pre-cut bandwagon with "Westies," 6.5" strips packaged in different color ways. I'd never seen them before, and found the greens and purples hard to resist. Besides, it would have been rude to leave empty-handed after drinking in all that color...

I feel a Log Cabin coming on!

Happy New Year, everybody!

Famous last words...

"...beat the weather."

Right.

My four hour drive turned into a seven and a half hour adventure, due to a snowstorm that started five hours earlier than expected, a mass exodus of Chicagoans to places other than Chicago, and the fact that Michigan has no money and can't afford to plow their expressways.

But I made it home, and Archie was a trooper, sleeping most of the trip on the dashboard above the glove compartment. He got some surprised looks from other drivers as we crawled along at 40mph.

Weather notwithstanding, Christmas was a success, with lots of time spent with family and friends. My Monkey Girl loved her quilt, as I thought she might. There was some admiring of it...

Some dancing with it...

And, of course, some snuggling in it.

My mother cried when she unfolded her anniversary quilt. But because I promised she wouldn't show up all teary-eyed on the blog for all the world to see, we just have Archie, who, outside of a brief confrontation with a camel, inexplicably left both the tree and the creche totally alone. Maybe that was my Christmas miracle?

We spent a day with my brother's little guys (note continued use of my flannel birthday quilt)...

And were entertained with some Chris-tmas carols...

And, of course, there was sewing. Binding, to be exact.

Two weeks of hand sewing can really do a number on your wrists. I finished it on Saturday, and my sister was very happy with the results. She was also happy she didn't have to help.

The return trip to Chicago was windy, but uneventful. The snow is completely gone, though we're expecting some tonight. Time to clean up the mess I left last week -- and get down to more sewing!

Hope everybody's Christmas was wonderful!

C'est finis...

And there was much dancing in the Great Hall...

I watched (OK, listened to) over FOURTEEN HOURS of TiVo this weekend. To say I'm slow would be an understatement. My butt hurts from sitting in one place for so long, but it's done. And I have never been so happy about finishing a quilt. Now I just have to find my printable fabric for a label...and I have NO idea where it might be, I haven't used it in a year -- it could be anywhere!

Too bad I'm giving it away -- it kind of matches the blues in my living room...

I also managed to come close to finishing this one, too...it's done except for the (hah!) binding, which I'll finish later this week. Sorry sis, you're getting this incomplete. Blame it on Mom.

I think it's safe to say I'll never do the flying geese with all flannel ever again -- too many lumps. I ironed the seams open where I could, but it still made quilting difficult. I got these really tiny stitches as the machine approached a knob, and these really loooong ones on the downside. Not my best work, obviously, but once it's washed and all puckery, who's going to know?

Archie gets into packing tape

The backing is the absolutely luscious Thimbleberries flannel. It's incredibly soft, and a wonderful Art Nouveau design that's a good contrast in style to the front.

Tomorrow I fill the sleigh with presents and hit the road. There's a winter storm warning for Illinois and Michigan starting mid-day tomorrow, so I'm hoping I can get an early start and beat the weather.

Not sure if there's wireless at Mom & Dad's, so Happy Holidays, readers! Hope your Christmas is warm and cuddly...just like our quilts!

Pefect weather for binding...

Twenty-eight degrees and falling to four tonight. Eight inches of wet, heavy, crusty snow on the ground. Good day to stay inside, drink hot chocolate with steamed milk, and sew. And sew. And sew.

Guess what I'm doing all day? Sewing? How'd you know?

I really don't have the attention span for this.

Thanks so much for all the encouragement and helpful comments. It's moving slightly faster -- I rounded my second corner this afternoon. Hardly the home stretch, but I'm getting there.

I still don't think there's a chance in hell I'm going to finish this by the time I leave town. Worst case scenario, it gets wrapped up as is and Mom and I can finish it next week, though I'm not so sure just how enthused she'll be to have to finish her own Christmas gift.

Now that I have more than just a small section to look at, I absolutely love the way it looks! I used a two and a quarter-inch strip to start, so the binding is nice and narrow. I'm a sucker for the stripes, and the hand finishing was definitely the way to go here.


And in an effort to multi-task...here's the Malibu Monkeys quilt in its entirety, fresh from the dryer. It's a little more haphazard than I'd originally envisioned it would be, but this is what happens when you have neither a plan nor enough blue blocks. I think my Monkey Girl is going to love it no matter what.

I really wanted it to be the right size so the back was a seamless landscape of monkeys and beach. It fit perfectly, finishing at about 40" x 50".

No, it's not your eyes --the lighting here is frighteningly yellow.

All right, enough messing around on the blog -- there's sewing to be done!

Deck the halls...or not

Given the fact that I have absolutely no confidence that Archie wouldn't destroy the Christmas tree in a heartbeat, this is the extent of my decorating this year: a reindeer I forgot to pack with the rest of the stuff last January, and two lodgepole pine cones I brought back from Lake Tahoe several years ago.

Never mind that the pine cones are on the mantel all year long, anyway. I don't have a lot of unbreakables to work with here.

Sad, I know, but I have a fairly sizeable collection of Christopher Radko ornaments, as well as a whole lot of Shiny Brites that have been in the family since the early 50's, none of which mixes very well with a psycho little beast who literally bounces off the walls when he gets hyper. It's a low-key kind of Christmas here. Almost too un-Christmas-y.

So I went looking through some pictures and found these from last year:

My best buddy Gershwin, who never bothered the tree, the ornaments, and certainly never bounced off any walls.

Best cat ever. Maybe I should have considered cloning?

I'm delusional...

I seem to have overestimated my hand-sewing skills. By quite a bit.

I finished the little quilt binding on the machine in a snap. I was all pleased with myself, even treated myself to some cookies.

Then I sat down to the big quilt with my needle and thread.

Keeping in mind that I'd never done this before (I know, I know -- all those quilts and never hand-sewn a binding? For shame, Kate!), I allowed for some trial and error, some unstitching, and a few choice four-letter words, but basically envisioned myself whip, whip, whip stitching my way through it with AmandaJean efficiency and gift wrapping tomorrow night.

Dream on.

In the little time before and after work this week (which might well be the source of the problem: too friggin' much time spent at the office), I've gotten less than one side done. One side! Of a queen-sized quilt. Not even. In four days.

I was under the (apparently very mistaken) impression that this would go a lot faster. I calculated my actual foot-per-day progress, and if I continue at this pace, I will be done somewhere around January 23rd.

And two more quilts to finish in the next seven days.

Time for start hoping for a Christmas miracle!

That light at the end of the tunnel's getting brighter...

Busy work week or not, this is my goal: to get the little quilt and the big quilt bound, wrapped and ready before Friday.


Let the binding begin!

Cookie Fest 2008...

Every year, my cousin and I get together and bake Grandma's cookies in an effort to lend some tradition to the season. Grandma was an awesome baker, having brought her skills -- and not much else -- with her from a small town in southern Austria just after the turn of the century.

Husarenkrapfen. Magdelenenschnitten. Lebkuchen. Spritz. Pfefferneusse. The names of them rolled off her tongue, but were hard for me to pronounce and made them seem so exotic, something to cherish. These weren't everyday cookies you wolfed down with a glass of milk; they were the kind of cookies that you took tiny, tiny bites of so they'd last as long as possible. They were the kind of cookies that you got as rewards for good grades and good behavior.

Grandma's been gone since both my cousin and I were teenagers, but just opening a tin filled with her honey ginger cookies propels me back to my childhood, where the fat red flowered cookie jar with the crack in the lid sat waiting on the breakfront in her dining room, filled to the brim in anticipation of our visit.

While I can't hold a candle to her talents, we do what we can to keep her legacy alive.

We've added some of our own favorites to the baking list over the years, but have scaled back at the same time. Twelve-hour days of baking 30-40 dozen cookies like we did ten years ago are a little beyond our reach these days, so we pick a few and go from there.

This year, my cousin had to bake 27 sets of star tree kits for her daughter's first grade holiday party -- that's six star-shaped, nut-free/citrus-free sugar cookies per set in graduated sizes. The kids will add a peppermint between each one and create a precarious tree of cookie, held together by frosting. It sounds risky.

Cookie Fest 2008 kicks off with tree kits and reindeer

In a stroke of genius, she sprinkle-coded each different size of cookie so she could tell them apart -- after a while, one layer starts looking like the next. A pretty neat trick, if you ask me.

I started in on the reindeer and Santa sugar cookies (with a few snowflakes thrown in for good measure), which we'll both ice later this week. Then we made Brazil nut crescents, chocolate peppermint Spritz, and finally, my all-time favorite, the Magdelenenschnitten. They're lemony, cake-like cookies with whipped egg whites, sugar and almonds on top.

Magdelenenschnitten. I promise, this is my last food photo!

Those may not make it back home for Christmas. They might be gone within the week.

The cookie list was shorter this year (I think all the tree kits did us in), but the rewards just as great. Lots of good family time, good conversation, and a chance to remember Grandma, who probably had no idea her two youngest grandchildren would be the ones to carry the torch.

At last...

A day all to myself.

To sleep in.

To savor my coffee and enjoy a long lunch.

To catch up on "Gray's Anatomy."

To quilt.

Which would be moving along much faster if this weren't happening every time I turn my back...

It's almost done, though! Could be cause for celebration!

Just when we were feeling all proud and hopeful about Chicago politics...

My smile for the day...

I just got this in an e-mail this morning from my Monkey Girl's mother:


What does the Tooth Fairy do with all those teeth, anyway? Make jewelry to sell so she has money to give all those toothless children? Or does she just have a really, really big basement?

Seems that she'd be happy not to have to collect one every once in a while...

Do you want some cheese with that whine?

I hate not having the time to make stuff. It makes me crabby. And whiny. So I guess this is a warning, readers. My apologies in advance, it could get ugly.

With a solid week of exhausting internal business meetings last week, there was no time for sewing...any free time being used for doing the work I should have been doing if it weren't for the meetings, punctuated by little bits of sleep.

Ah, sleep. I broke out the 42-oz. down comforter last night. I have never hibernated so well!

On the upside, we had our little holiday dinner at a local microbrewery on Tuesday and got to take a tour. And drink all we wanted...which, with boss in tow and meetings the next day, wasn't much. (Sigh.)

Goose Island's best brews

The weekend was consumed by all the real life I didn't get to (because of the aforementioned meetings creating a logjam in my schedule): grocery shopping, laundry, ferrying the recycling to the neighborhood receptacle, and (most importantly) putting plastic on my windows to ward off the wicked winds...which led to the discovery that this adorable little creature, who looks so harmless, so vulnerable, so incapable of any wrongdoing...

...is a spiteful little shit.

Pardon the expression, but that about sums it up.

In my absence this week, he put his claws through not one but both sets of my not-so-cheap custom top-down/bottom-up window blinds. Because he's a vindictive little beast.

And before you give him the benefit of the doubt, I also found a picture of me that had been ripped, chewed and clawed to pieces -- which makes it very hard to believe that this isn't personal. Maybe I'd better start watching my back?

I haven't thrown in the towel with this critter just yet, but after spending thirty minutes trying ("trying" being the operative word here) to clip his claws this morning, I'm seriously questioning the choice I made in picking this particular cat.

This clipping operation requires wearing a jacket, leather gloves, jeans, and boots (you would too after he's sunk his teeth into your leg), and taking two rugs and a beach towel into the bathroom with me to try to contain the whirlwind of claws and teeth. The venture was successful, but not without a few scratches to exposed skin and the total destruction of the trust I've been trying to build with him since the last time I did this two months ago.

I'm trying to be patient -- I'm sure he was mistreated and tormented in his former life, so I'm all about trying to make his life here so much better -- but he's not making it very easy. As I tell him every day, it's a damn good thing he's cute.

So OK, busy crappy week, ungrateful pet, and no time to sew...until this afternoon. I got the Malibu Monkeys top all put together and have started to quilt it (is fusible batting the best invention or what?). It's started to grow on me!

Add to that another hopeless effort to get a handle on my kitchen, in which I purged the refrigerator of sad-looking vegetables and made soup (red cabbage, leeks, garlic, potatoes, spinach, carrots, and an onion). It actually looks halfway decent, now that I've taken an immersion blender to it. It needed a punch, so I just added some red wine, and will top it with a dollop of creme fraiche...

So all said, I guess the end of the weekend is looking up. I'm making stuff after all.

Too late to turn back now...

Not sure I like how this is turning out.

But I spent a good part of the weekend trying to get this bottom half together -- it's like assembling a puzzle -- and damned if I'm going to give up on it at this point.


It's not my best work design-wise, but it's bright and loud, two things to which I continually aspire -- and how much happier can you get than sock monkeys at the beach?