Bring out Your Dead!

I'm not dead yet.
(Love me some Monty Python).

So....it's been a while.  That is what happens when you are working multiple jobs, finishing multiple gift quilts that can't be posted until they have  been delivered, and oh - I don't know - LIVING IN A HELLISH SNOW VORTEX.  Officially we had 108" of snow, 103" arriving after January 5, 2015, but that's Boston's total and as we are just north on Cape Ann, we picked up substantial more ocean effect snow on top of that.

This is my 6'4" husband knocking down the treacherous lip of  snow hanging off the garage.  This was our only access out of our house for over a month and a half, and we had to fight to keep it open.  One day we went downstairs to leave and found so much snow had drifted on to the storm door that we had to take the glass panel out (from the inside) so we could push enough snow away in order to get the door open. This was not as lighthearted and whimsical as it sounds, nosirreee. The good news is we've been able to use our front door (just like normals) for about a week and a half. It still feels brand new and sparkly and wonderful. The bad news is the winter kill and melting snow has revealed all kinds of awful stuff. Lots of work ahead.

So what did I get accomplished?  Finished an epic battle with a Christmas "woobie" quilt for my friend John. John LOVES Charlie Brown Christmas and requested his own quilt for seasonal decorating and snuggling.  It's a hard thing to make a quilt for.... let's just say a guy with multiple cars and a lot of Rolex, etc. around his oceanfront home. It took ages, I made it all up myself, and I'll never do it again.

Some of these are "work in progress" pictures but the overall effect is there. I didn't get good pictures taken because I finished it JUST before Christmas and didn't have time. I'll do so next year, just to get the proof of it in my files. BTW - the blue lights around the border represent the blue lights he does on his house every Christmas. It's another good story that goes back about 27 years, I'll write about it sometime.

This is a shirtings quilt top I did for our friends, Matt and John. Matt brought over 2 huge bags of their 'old' shirts and asked me to start a quilt for them. (Note to self - never again agree to make a quilt for an engineer.) It took longer to cut up the shirts and iron out flat pieces to cut than it did to sew it all back together. It took me almost as long to sell him on the idea of sashing it with the light gray instead of harsh white. (They have 2 huge dogs....).  John didn't know about this until he opened it on Christmas, and I think there was some unrest about "I thought we had those in the attic for storage, I needed one of them....".  Glad I wasn't there for that. When I saw John next, he gave me one of his wonderful, rib-crushing hugs and thanked me. That's a happy ending. It will be king sized when finished, but who knows when that will happen.

ME. MOI.  After 150 years of making quilts for other people, I took time out to make one for ME. I'm sharing it with my husband because he sleeps with me, but it is MINE. It was made from 100% stash - front and back - and boy did it knock down the piles. I'm not racing to buy new fabric because I'd need to make another 3 or 4 of these this size to be able to rationalize that.  I love it. There are fabrics in there from my mom and one of my sisters' stashes. There are fabrics from other quilts I've made.  It is warm and wrinkly and it makes me very happy.  It is also HUGE.  I sleep on my side and (TMI WARNING) I don't like it when the quilt doesn't cover my extremities. This one does. 

That's enough for now. I survived QuiltCon in Austin, Texas and had a ball working a booth for Why Quilts Matter - History, Art and Politics. I wasn't able to stock up on Aurifil thread the way I had hoped - they had a company booth but they weren't vending. I did get a good color chart and they sent me to a couple of booths that had limited colors, so I did manage to get my hands on some thread and their new (to me) floss. I've burned through enough thread in the last 7 months to realize I need to get the BIG CONES of some of the neutrals I use so much of - it's worth the investment. Besides, I'm not buying fabric, right? Okay, so I did buy ONE piece of fabric, an incredibly beautiful wax print from Ananse Village,  but that is for a jacket and not a quilt so it doesn't count against the stash. (You can reach me at 1-800-RATIONALIZE)

I must stop NOW. I have 3 quilts in the on-deck circle, two are pieced and ready to quilt. One is a wedding quilt due this fall and....not started. But I have the fabric in my stash, so there's that. That counts as "started," right?