Holing Up to Sew!

Holing Up to Sew!

This is Jeannie’s hands at her featherweight while we were piecing away in Weslaco just a week ago!  It feels longer than that, doesn’t it? ... 11 years ago

This is Jeannie’s hands at her featherweight while we were piecing away in Weslaco just a week ago!  It feels longer than that, doesn’t it?

And I’m off to Texas again tomorrow morning…it seems I’ve done A LOT of Texas trips this year, and that is perfectly great with me.  I love Texas, and Texans!  I look at the time we lived in Texas as one of the best times of my life – all 3-1/2 years of it.  What a change from Idaho that was! 

So today, I’m repacking trunk show bags, making sure I have the right class samples for visits with 3 separate guilds, and filling in the remainder of the bag weight with quilts for my lectures.  It changes every time just a bit – depending on what class samples have to be stuck in there and what lectures the guilds have asked for. 

Since I can only travel with 100 lbs of quilts – usually combined tours like this end up with a combo of everything, a smorgasbord of Scrap User’s System with some String Fling thrown in and a bit of Adventures with Leaders & Enders as a side-dish.

It’s my last teaching tour of the year!  Boy, has this year flown by faster than any year previous.

My trip to Germany with Sew Many Places – all 26 of us going --- is coming up on December 6th, and I know there will be awesome things to share via the blog and Facebook while we are touring Germany, Austria and other parts of Bavarian wonder!

All while our Celtic Solstice mystery is running! 

Don’t worry, I will have clues written ahead of time so I can cover those Fridays that I am on the road.  And don’t forget that we will be doing the Mystery Monday Link-Ups!  The Monday FOLLOWING a clue release, you can share any amount of progress you have made during the week on your own blog, and link it up here on my blog so we are all in one place.  You do need a blog or a Flickr account to link up.  I can’t wait to see how your quilts will be progressing!  This time between Thanksgiving and New Years is my favorite time of year.

I returned from my friend’s house and our 1-1/2 day sewing fest yesterday afternoon, meeting The Hubster at the airport at 4:30 so he could return his rental car from his business trip.

And he is sick.  As. A. Dog.  Cold settling into chest cold ---poor guy.

And all the while I am trying to be comforting and sympathetic I am casting hexes over him with my eyes to keep him from polluting me before this trip to Texas and making ME sick with all I have coming up in the near future. 

And on top of that, we had our closing last night on the refi of our house!  Busy evening.

But after DH was chicken-souped and sent to bed, I escaped to the germ-free-zone of my basement studio ((NO SICKIES ALLOWED DOWN HERE!!)) and pulled out my stash of string units I have sewn over the past couple of days and trimmed and cut and de-papered until bed time.  And yes – I slept in the guest room.  I am NOT.  I repeat – NOT going to get sick from this!

I counted.  I have 124 string sashings.  See them pinned in bundles of 10?  Makes them easy to count that way!

I counted my corner stones that are under way.  I have 33.

I am paper piecing these little square in a square cornerstones.  They finish at 2”.  The pdf for printing the foundation papers is found HERE.

I counted my blocks to see where we stand:

52!!

My plans have changed a bit.  Instead of doing 49 blocks set 7 X 7 – I’m going to do 56 blocks set 7 X 8.  That means I need four more blocks.

Guess what I will be doing today after book orders are out and trunk show stuff is packed?

You will find me in the sewing room staying away from the sickie monsters!  And I think we should do QUILT-CAM at 2pm Eastern, don’t you?  Bring a project and come sew with me.  We can stay away from the sickies together!

Have you entered my Give-Away for Quiltmaker Magazines 100 blocks by 100 designers, Vol 8??  The blog tour is still going on, and my drawing is tomorrow evening!  I’ll be drawing the winners from my hotel room in Texas – click HERE and leave me a comment on that post to win!  I’m giving away THREE copies!

And I think that is all for now.  Time to get OFF the computer and get busy.  See you at 2pm!

Click Here to like our Quiltville Friends Page on Facebook for more fun!You do not need a Facebook account to read the Facebook posts - They are viewable to all! Feel free to read & quilt along with us!