Honey, I'm home!

Got back from my work trip a few days ago and am mostly recovered. Still a little nonverbal. It takes us introverts awhile to recover from having to pretend to be extraverts for a couple of weeks running. So I'm slowly getting myself into the swing of things. I sent out a few tweets this week, now I'm writing a blog post...eventually I'll work my way back up to recording a podcast episode.

Meanwhile, here's the project I'll be working on this month.

Pretty, ain't it?

This is the last of the Momufos. What's a Momufo?

Check here.

And here.

And maybe here too, if you're really into it.

There may have been others, but that's all I am awake enough to dig up in past blog posts. I consider this project the last of the Momufos because it's the last of her work-in-progress projects that I decided I'd finish myself. I have clear memories of talking about this project with her, and I had even given her some fabric out of my own stash to use with it if she wanted--that fabric is still in her project bag with everything else for the quilt. It's one she designed herself in EQ, and I know what she intended to do with it when she was done. So it was the last project of hers that I really felt I needed/wanted to finish on her behalf.

It'll take some doing. Unlike all the other projects of hers that I mostly needed to just bind, or quilt and then bind, this one hasn't been fully pieced yet. It's a combo platter of paper piecing and standard pieced blocks. There are 8 blocks left to finish, and unfortunately, she didn't seem to have gotten to the point of printing off all the paper piecing foundations for those blocks. There's one block from that set done, and one printed paper pieced pattern. Unfortunately, the two aren't the same size. Go figure. I need to do some math to figure out how much to blow up the printed pattern to get it the same size as the one finished block, and then try to print off additional foundations on my own printer and hope the size differential isn't too substantial. (Each printer prints a little differently, so there will always be some variance.)

Then I get to put all the blocks together and hope they all play nice in the sandbox!

It's a design and colorway that I appreciate but wouldn't necessarily do myself at the moment--not my current idiom. Which makes it almost more fun to do, I think. It's a little hard to tell right now, but I think it could be stunning when it's finished. (Beautiful design, Mom. Nice job.) I have a vacation coming up the middle of this month and this will be my primary vacation project--if the whole "resizing the foundation" thing goes well, I should easily be able to get the top pieced by the end of that week. Famous last words, of course.

I do have one other set of random blocks from Mom but that one isn't clearly a UFO to me. It could have easily been a class project that she never intended to finish, but stored the blocks away anyway. Those blocks weren't kept with all her other ongoing projects, so I don't think they were on her own UFO list. I love the blocks, though, so eventually I'll do something with them. They were too cute to toss. Through this process of finishing Mom's UFOs, by the way, I've found that I have a very clear definition of what a UFO is. In my mind, a UFO is a partially-done project that you actually intended to finish. Mull that one over for a bit.

Time for bed. The Olympics have been keeping me up far too late this week.







Playing with the Palette for my Next Project

Nice alliteration in the title, eh?

So apparently it's not enough that I currently have four projects in the works; I have to start thinking about my fifth. Someone shoot me before I hurt myself.

What's on my design wall, cutting mat, or sewing machine right now?

(1) Pinwheel project (it's made significant progress since the last post that talked about it); (2) Serengeti project (from my May quilt retreat--apparently I've not posted a pic of it yet, sorry); (3) Chicken Butt project; (4) Hexie project (have 39 out of about 180 hexies cut). Plus two UFOs that really just need to get done this summer because they're starting to annoy me, hanging on their hangers, mocking me every time I walk by them.

But still, I can't help myself. I started playing with fabrics in my stash the other night. Here's the palette that resulted.

The two that got things rolling are the second and third in from the left. Several weeks ago I'd been moving fabrics around and just tossed one of those on top of the other to get it momentarily out of the way. When I went to pick it up later to put it away, I was struck by the two sitting side-by-side. Not my normal color palette at all. But even after I'd put them back in their normal locations, I found myself thinking about those two colors again and again. I finally put myself out of my quilty misery and started pulling other pieces off my shelf.

I was a little worried about contrast until I took the black and white version. It actually seems to be OK. I might still want something a hair lighter in there, maybe another print, but since I don't even know what I'm doing with them yet, I'm not sweating it at the moment.

I think I know what they're destined to become a part of, but it's all very misty in my head. I'll let it percolate on its own for awhile; it'll all come together in due time.

Apparently I'm working at a very high level of distraction these days. I suspect that has to do with the fact that it's crunch time at work right now; lots of deadlines hitting all at once. I can keep track of everything and stay head-down-blinders-on-nose-to-the-grindstone while I'm working. Then I get off my computer at the end of the work day and it's like every methodical part of me flies out the window and I can't keep focus for more than seven seconds at a time. I can live with that--I know it's not Normal Me so I'll roll with it and welcome Normal Me whenever she decides to come back and live in my house again.

Meanwhile, I have some fabric to go pet.