Blog? What blog?

It's been a while, hasn't it? What started out as an intent to write when I had something finished to show off turned into a whirlwind of projects where lots got started and very little was getting done. That shouldn't be a surprise.

Anyway, over the past month I've been busy crafting, and working a little, and blogging has definitely taken a back seat. My apologies. I'm going to try to be more diligent in the New Year, but I also hate making resolutions, so we'll see how long that lasts.

But five days before Christmas, I am done with all but one project, which is an easy one so I've saved it for last.

Since Thanksgiving, I made my Christmas cards...

and stenciled some stationery...

made my sister an apron...

and decorated a whole lot of Christmas cookies.

But the biggest project this year was one I never intended to do.

You see, this Fall my Monkey Girl's mother decided to rehab the vacation house up north, which meant, basically, clearing it out and taking it down to the studs. The house has been in her family for thirty years, and I've been going up there for twenty-seven of them. There was a lot of history there, and memories, and lots of work to be done. I went up to help in September, right about the time she decided that the sofa, a wonderfully huge, comfortable sectional she'd had in her first apartment here in Chicago, needed to go. The slipcover wouldn't match the new decor, and it was going to cost just as much to reupholster as to buy a new one.

Unbeknownst to her, before Habitat for Humanity came to pick up all the donated building materials and furniture, I rescued the slipcover. All thirty-some yards of it.

I was going to make a quilt out of it, and still will at some point -- but a few weeks ago I got a PajamaGram catalog in the mail and the wheels started turning -- and I couldn't get them to stop. When they finally did, I had this:

Monkey Girl, her mother, and Samantha the American Girl Doll are all getting matching pj's this Christmas!

I used coordinating stripe from my stash, and some sweatshirt material I was saving for just such an emergency. There was a mile of piping, which I used on the bottom of Monkey Girl's top (it reverses to the slipcover fabric), and made more from the stripe for the bigger pants. The only drawback was that none of the fabric pieces were long enough to do an adult-length leg, so Mom's getting hers cropped, but that's it. I'm pretty proud of the results!

And besides being in love love love with piping now, here's my favorite part: the half-inch buttons for the reversible top. Too cute!

Hope everyone's holiday crafting is going well!

And Merry Christmas!

Best meal EVER...

I have the most wonderful food hangover this morning, thanks to my cousin and her neverending culinary skills. It's no wonder everyone in the family looks forward to Thanksgiving all year long!

Hope everybody had a great turkey day!

When procrastination is a good thing (sort of)...

Most of the time procrastination gets a bad rap.

I admit, there are times when it involves periods of outright sloth, vegging on the couch watching multiple reruns of "Grey's Anatomy" or blog surfing instead of addressing the task at hand -- but there are times when it actually pays off.

I like to think of it as "productive procrastination" -- avoiding projects by getting a whole bunch of other items (things that themselves have been put off, no doubt) checked off the to-do list.

Such was the case last week when I should have been working another project. Not only did I wash, spackle and caulk my windows, I got packages shipped that had been sitting around for ages, took my car in for service, changed the furnace filter, hauled my paper and plastic to the recycling center, organized some fabric, and dug out a UFO that's been sitting around since...well, let's just say Detroit was still producing Oldsmobiles when I originally started it.

I have a feeling it was abandoned because a) it was my first so-so foray into paper piecing b) I'd put it off so long that it wasn't finished by its Thanksgiving deadline (a case where procrastination was a bad thing), but this year? It'll be finished with time to spare!

It's a weak rationale for not doing what I'm supposed to, but it assuages some of the guilt.

Taking the easy way out...

OK, I admit it:  I was really tired of these fabrics.

I probably should have put them away for a few weeks and come back to them when I had a fresh perspective, but I also wanted to get the last top DONE. So I took the easy way out and did 6.5" blocks with sashing.

I worked through quite a few different ideas for this one, but they all came out way too busy, and ugly, much like the first one I did. So I stuck with simple, and didn't let the yellow overpower everything like it tends to do.

It's a relief to have all three tops done -- so now I can stress about getting them quilted in time for Christmas. It's only six weeks away!

Life's a beach...

So here's my latest Paintstiks project in its 15" x 15" entirety. Since it was inspired by beach glass, I thought it was fitting to bring it back to where the idea began.

I drove back to South Haven this weekend to assess the damage from last week's freaky storm. Apparently the combination of extremely low pressure, rain and high winds created the equivalent of a Category 3 hurricane -- weather rarely (if ever) seen here in the Midwest -- and I imagined the worst as I watched The Weather Channel reports of the storm screaming across Lake Michigan. But outside of a couple loose shingles and finding somebody else's screen door in the driveway, the little cottage stood its ground as it has no doubt done for the past 98 years. There are signs that the waves, which must have been monstrous, came almost 100 yards up the beach; some of the snow fences have been leveled by the sheer volume of sand blown against them, and there's flotsam everywhere. It must have been a doozy, but you'd never know it now -- the past few days have been the calmest and quietest that I can remember.

I drank my coffee on the deck this morning, in my jammies, slippers and a fleece-lined jacket. Thirty-six degrees, perfectly clear skies, and not a even a wisp of wind -- no cars, no people, no noise at all. It's the total opposite of my neighborhood in Chicago with the El roaring by, school buses, kids, sirens and car alarms -- I sometimes wonder why I live there.

Maybe it's just so I appreciate here more?

Fall Quilt Fest

Amy's having another Blogger's Quilt Festival, and I'm jumping into the pool with this one:

It's "Currents," the quilt from my blog header. I made it in the Winter of 2009, just as I was getting laid off the job I'd held for nine years. It was good timing, actually -- I suddenly had all the time in the world on my hands, and coincidentally, I had just started sandwiching this piece, which required, well, all the time in the world to quilt.

The quilting was a total experiment -- I wanted it to look like the ripples that form in the sand along the shores of Lake Michigan:

This took weeks to finish, which for me was the biggest challenge:  not letting myself work on anything else until this was done. It represents my ability to conquer my ADD and muster the wherewithal to finish something when I really put my mind to it

It is also, after seven years of making quilts, the first quilt I ever kept for myself. It hangs on my living room wall, and every time I look at it, I'm amazed that me-of-little-patience created something so labor intensive -- and something so cool.

A Friday WIP...

I needed a break from my Three Sisters project, so I took another stab at making my own fabric with Paintstiks. The more I work with them, the more I like them!

This one's a little cleaner than the last one, with a much calmer color palette. I like the crisper lines better than the jagged ones -- they're definitely easier to follow.

In retrospect, I should have been more adventurous with the quilting, but that just means I have to do more of them, right?

Hoping to cut all those pesky threads and bind it today to get it off the holiday gift list...then it's back to all that pink, green and yellow stuff!

More from FunQuilts...

A few more pictures from Sunday's meeting. Enjoy!

Lucky us!

The speakers at yesterday's CMQG meeting were Bill Kerr and Weeks Ringle, the husband and wife team that make up FunQuilts. They have a great philosophy on modern quilting, and brought several quilts from their new book, "Making Quilts Modern," due out next month.

They also brought some old favorites for us to see. To be able to touch these and run our hands over the quilting was an added bonus! Kits for all of the following are available on their website.

"Call Me Crazy"

"Call Me Crazy" back/quilting detail 

"Leaves" 

"Raindrops" up close

These two do a phenomenal collaborative job with color and value and achieving the look of transparency in their pieces, and their quilting really has a great organic feel. If you're not familiar with their work, it's definitely worth checking out!

Another year older...

I had a birthday last week. So what did I do? I ran away.

I went here (with a stop here, of course) for some glorious sunrises and to watch Fall arrive in true northern Michigan fashion...

...and then went to South Haven for some long walks around town and spectacular sunsets...

...and now, at last, we are back.

At least someone is happy to be home!