Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough

After such a lapse in blogging it's hard to know where to start again...with apologies, explanations, or pages and pages recapping all that's happened in the interim? It's best perhaps just to give a nod of acknowledgement to the difficulties of the past few months, and start back in.  We can kid ourselves into believing we are in control of our lives but all it takes is one hard knock to remind us otherwise..

Somehow in all the chaos, the book got finished and was couriered out to the publisher last week - a full 10 days before the deadline.  To design, sew, quilt, diagram and pattern 13 quilts plus write the narrative in under 4 months is no small feat, especially when the entire month of September was lost. There were many long days and short nights. I am so grateful to Lynn Bourgeois, Kari Lippert and Darlene Gerber for their willingness to proof and test the instructions.  It amused me to read this line from Kurt Vonnegut yesterday: "writing a book is an enormous ball of cotton batting, which sops up thousands of hours, giving almost nothing but a little lint in return..."  I am hoping that since I used wool batting and not cotton, there will be more to it than lint :)
So now it's time to get myself back on track and do some fun things.  I've been itching to get some of Mrs. Pugsley's gorgeous fabrics under my needle so I made a beeline for her Christmas prints.  I designed a super simple Christmas tree skirt, the pattern for which will be available very shortly.  It went together like butter and I can't wait to share some more pictures with you.

And then - because it's absolutely no fun just to work on one thing at a time - I started in on this gorgeous Asian Peony collection by Hoffman. I love the gold sparkle in the fabric;  it's like stitching a Paragon china tea cup.

The picture at the top of the post shows Maddie decked out in his Mt. A. colours in support of his favourite Mounties football team. The Mounties are having an amazing season and this weekend play in the Uteck bowl against Laval. If you are lucky enough to have scored a ticket, maybe you'll see Maddie there (if you do, please send him home!)