That last minute thing...

There is nothing like doing things the last minute. Many moons ago I selected seven, yes, seven designs for seven quilts to enter into 2015 Quiltcon. This reminds me of that Iron Maiden song "Seven deadly sims, seven ways to win, seven holy paths to hell and your trip begins..." I had two years to execute my plan...and I procrastinated for one year and 11 months. The last month has been a sweet hell, a whirlwind of not sleeping, quilting, burying threads, screaming at the Gods of quilting, but three of the seven quilts are done, finished, photographed and submitted. All I have to do is wait and see if any of them get in. Keep your fingers crossed.

(Never) say never

There are many quilting techniques and styles that are simply not my cup of tea, so I stay away from them. I do not even give them a chance to plant a seed of interest in my head. My mind is not as open as you might think. 

A few days ago, Quiltcon 2015 catalogue was published and I was smacked head on by one of those techniques that I would not even discuss - bias tape appliqué. I like, scratch that, I LOVE challenges of any kind, and this time the challenge is bias tape appliqué. So, I opened my mind, just a smidgen, to think about this technique that was up until now packed away with all the undesirable ones. And, as you guessed, I got hooked, completely obsessed with this technique. I cannot sleep, I cannot read, all I can do is think of quilt designs that would utilize bias tape appliqué. I have so many ideas, I went through almost an entire design pad, and I have an urge to make all of them into quilts. My day is only 24 hours long, so I have to pick one. A difficult choice to say the least.

The moral of this story is not obscure - never say never, because if you do, you will have to go back and eat those words with the side of humility, just like I did. Happy quilting!

Supernova Block Swap

Fellow MQG member Sandra, who blogs at One Million Stitches and her friend Stephanie of  Late Night Quilter put together an event called the Supernova Friendship Block Swap. I have already joined, and if you would like to join as well, hop over to one of their blogs and let the fun begin.

The idea is to pair up with a quilter you really do not know all that well (a fellow blogger, somebody you met on a quilting forum) and swap Supernova Friendship blocks. You will end up with a gorgeous quilt and in the process learn more about each other. The way how Sandra and Stephanie explained is that  "each time we send our surprise package with a new block in it, we’re also going to include a few details about ourselves.
Each month we’ll add a couple of questions on our blogs for all of us to answer and give to our partners. With my experience as a journalist and Stephanie’s as a psychologist, you can bet we’ll have no trouble coming up with some interesting ones!"

I think this is going to be a blast. I am already ransacking my finally organized underground lair for suitable fabrics. Supernova is designed by Lee at Freshly Pieced, who featured it last year on her own Supernova Quilt Along.

Supernova by Lee from Freshly Pieced (used with permission)

(Long) Armed and Dangerous

Like every creative person, I am a procrastinator extraordinaire. If I have a deadline, I will make it with no issues. BUT, you can believe me when I say that 90% of work will be done in the last possible moment, with no room for error, power outage, machine malfunction, or thread breaks. I am sitting on a mountain of quilt tops ready to be quilted. I procrastinated for over a year. My excuse - I lost my long arm and I was in mourning. Well, no more excuses, my brand spanking new Handi Quilter Avante is coming home....finally. I have cleared the space, measured it many times, and yes, it can fit in my underground sewing den, all 12 feet of it. All I need now is time to quilt those tops....and this is how it starts, the new excuses to procrastinate are popping up....

Messy Bessy

Today is the day, the dreaded day when I finally have to tidy up my underground lair aka my sewing room. There are two kinds of quilters out there, the ones that have very orderly and organized sewing rooms, and than there is my kind - the Messy Bessys. We thrive on the colossal mess left behind from our design process that nobody except us can find anything. Our needles really are in the proverbial hay stack of fabrics, rulers, batting, and who knows what else. I have a really nice, large, cutting table curtesy of my handy man husband. Right now I cannot even see the table under the pile of God knows what. I has gotten so bad, that finally I have to clean the heap staring at me if I want to work on any of my projects. We have been staring at each other, the heap and I for a week now, and the heap won. I blinked first, and looked away in utter disgust and dismay. With some luck, I will find tools that have been missing for a while, although it is so much easier to blame the Borrowers for everything that disappeared in thin air or under the pile of creative rubbish. Wish me luck. If I don't post anything in the next few days, send in the search and rescue.

The Gap

A few days ago I watched "The Gap" by Ira Glass on YouTube. I am a fairly creative person, but I found myself in that video 100%. My taste and my designs do not quite match up yet, and most of the work I produce although technically correct, is pure (s)crap from design point of view. Before watching this video, I would just abandon whatever project I was working on because I did not like it. It looked better in my head, and on the paper. After watching this video I decided to plow through several of these projects, because I agree that an artist, or a writer, or any creator can achieve his or her own taste but before it happens he or she has to produce a great volume of (s)crap, stuff that is substandard to our goals and taste. Here are a few abandoned projects that I decided to finish in the following weeks. Maybe this will get me closer to my goal, a design perfection equaling my taste.

Austin or bust...

A friend posted on the Facebook - Behind every successful woman is a best friend giving her crazy ideas. So true. As a result of one of those ideas, my quilting friend and I decided to go to Quiltcon held in Austin Texas in February 2015. Our motto "Austin or bust".

If you were a normal person still not infected with a quilting bug you would think that we are crazy by making plans for something that was happening a year from now. Don't be so fast to judge us - half the hotel rooms in Austin are already booked and if you do not want to commute from Albuquerque, NM to the conference every day, you better book your hotel ASAP. You can always cancel the room if something cataclysmic happens, if we collide with a meteorite or the Earth stops spinning. All other excuses not to go to the Quiltcon are just that - excuses.

The question remains if one or both of us are going to enter our quilt(s) into the show. Less blogging and more quilting could, maybe, possibly, get us there. Are you planning on going?