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.