Where have I been lately?

Hanging out. Cleaning up. Thankfully, few things are as life-affirming as a stack of clean tea towels:

McCall Cover, Joan Caulfield

Originally uploaded by George Eastman House

Want.

(The kitties and the sweater, not the McCall cover.)

Thank you all so much for your interest, but we are now FULL.

And apologies to anybody who couldn’t get my comments page to work. It was a totally unfortunate factor in the sign-up process.

Swap members can expect an email from me soon!

for a virtual quilting bee!

These are all the rage right now, and I want to play!

Questions? Comments? Joiners? You know where to find the box.

Oh, dear. It seems I have once again neglected my bloggy home in favor of dealing with my actual home.

But can you blame me?

I don’t know if I would have even signed the lease on this place if it hadn’t had that cute red door.

We’re keen on the built-ins, too.

Because we are renters, we have to think of inventive ways of fighting off vast expanses of white space without paint.

Which is not too tough for a quilter. Did you know I first learned about pomanders from the Little House books?

A corner of the dining room.

We call it the Mad Men corner, actually.

Pretty much everything lives in the dining room, as it’s the biggest room in the house for some reason.

Hence, the Civil War-era dresser - that won’t fit in the bedroom - all decked out with holiday libations. The big oatmeal container is full of Scottish shortbread my grandmother sent for my birthday. Yumtastic!

Happy New Year, everyone!

Two and a half weeks ago, I decided I’d had it with our current apartment. Which is a nice way of saying, when Hambone asked me when I wanted to put up the Christmas tree, I threw a tantrum than only a scan of Craigslist could squelch.

Within a few hours, we’d found our new home. We move in Saturday.

There’s a lot to be done, and I, unfortunately, am in that weird limbo between wanting to get everything ready to go and still needing some of the stuff I want to pack.

Last night, I said, “To hell with everything! Let’s QUILT!”

And quilt I did:

I’d pieced these rows of charm squares (well, halves of charm squares) sometime last summer, and got frustrated when I couldn’t seem to get them to line up in a random enough way.

I promptly lost a couple of those rows, and, also, I’m over caring if they match too well. As I’m sure you noticed. Sewn in a group of four, the whole thing seemed squat, so I added a quarter of a border and moved right on to quilting.

This was a snap to get through the machine. I should learn free-motion quilting some day, but, honestly, I have so much fun with straight lines and masking tape, I almost don’t see the point. I hand quilted a version of the birdie that appears in some of the pieces, and called it a day. (At least, a crafting day. I can’t seem to go to sleep without a couple of hours of obsessing over Battlestar. Only 36 more days!

Today the binding went on. What did I do with myself before procuring this hounds tooth? Seriously - I need you to check my blog archives and remind me.

And I really do need to clean, but… well, seeing as how it’s not too late in the day, I’m wondering if this is a feat I can pull off again. Like, now-ish.

I’m having a tough time making holiday wares with so many holiday gifts on my plate - and not showing off the latter is kinda killing me!

But, I finally updated my etsy shop after a short, two-year hiatus. Woo-hoo!

Hopefully, it will be days, not years, before I add more items. Especially since it drives me nuts when the number of my items isn’t divisible by three.

Please tell me there’s someone out there who loves a perfect grid formation as much as I do, and understands my obsessiveness on this issue….

I had a stitch in my side and decided to stretch out with the laptop for a bit.

Guess who showed up a moment later looking for a warm spot?

Thank goodness for the webcam. I could not have captured her cuteness otherwise.

PILLOW!!!!

I know the pic is iffy and the lumps aren’t quite smoothed over - believe me, I worked up a sweat stuffing that big, long pillow into that thick muslin envelope - but it’s a successful log cabin project.

Completed.

How often does that happen???

So, there you have it - a block of triangles, arranged all one-patch-like, made from the scraps of the many, many aprons I’ve made.

You may remember that this started as something of an experiment. I didn’t feel like cutting a bunch of other triangles to size, so I just sewed these on top of some big scraps of muslin, cut out with scissors, and pieced. I wanted it to look really wonky.

It looks sort of wonky. I think I’ve decided to embrace the “sort of.” Like vintage piecing that was well done at one point, but distorted with age. This is why I love quilting. Looking old = ++.

I do so dearly wish I had more to report, but, alas, it is cut, sew, repeat season at the Saucy Cottage. I start shipping items to Craftland today, which means I may get to come up for air for a bit….