Last week I passed my oral review and submitted my final D.Min. thesis so it's just a matter of taking care of a few more bureaucratic details and I'll be graduating! Paperwork aside, I shouldn't have to deal with the thesis anymore, anyway, so it's free and clear for getting down to some serious fabric play!
However, there was some celebrating to do first. My brother-in-law was in from out of town so we spent a lot of time with family, and due to the timing, it turned into an impromptu celebration of the thesis submission too. I thought I'd share this pic from one of the family events--this is one of my nieces and her (recently officialized) fiance. He's been part of the family for years but now we can all for-sure commit to him! He's a great guy, so we're thrilled.
I'm sharing this photo with you so you have faces to put together with what will soon become a continuing project you'll be following for awhile. They tell me I have a couple of years before their actual wedding as she's working on her masters in nursing and he's trying to work his way up the ranks of chef-dom. I'm not going to waste the time!
It was a great celebration but then Auggie threw a monkey wrench in the works by deciding to play with a skunk after we got home later--much later--that night.
Goofy dog. He's celebrating his first birthday this weekend by making himself as obnoxious as possible. (Puppy brain in adult body. We have another year of this before he starts actually making smarter decisions. But even at that, they're only "smarter" in the range of Golden-dom which is a fairly narrow range.)
I was already pretty wiped out from a long week and a late night and got to spend time giving him peroxide-baking soda-Dawn baths Saturday and Sunday. Three baths later and he's now bearable, but still leaves a bit of a trail of Eau d' Skunk as he walks by. Fortunately the weather turned nice enough that we were able to open windows and try to air things out. Still a little stinky, but livable.
However, by Sunday afternoon, after church and the third peroxide bath, I was able to sit down and get some more sewing done. I'm now up to about 13 blocks done on the Flying Home quilt (the pattern from Jenny Doan) with the Nest jelly roll. If I recall, I have to do 36 total blocks. They're not hard, but a little pokey. I can only chain-piece about four blocks at a time because I don't want to get mixed up which fabrics I've paired in which blocks. Random is hard.
I have a quilt retreat coming up on the first weekend of May. I'd really like to have all of these blocks pieced before then, so I can use the larger space at retreat to do layout and piece the top. Other than that, I don't know yet what I'll be bringing to retreat. That's a problem for next weekend!
I'm hoping to get a podcast posted next weekend and I'll be able to give a review of a couple of different tools I've used in doing these, and my opinions about them. I like my episodes to be useful!