No, I haven’t died this time either….just distracted by summer!   I had thought that if I didn’t schedule anything for most of August, I’d be OK.  Wrong…..  here’s the list:

• clean up messes from making Be Inspired
• send entry to Houston
• send quilts to AQS for photography
• do all final edits on book, send to AQS
• paint plywood piece that serves as a coffee table top on the back porch
• calculate yardage to make cushion covers for back porch settee and 2 rockers, but decide not enough disposable income yet to pay for the fabric….
• exchange sometimes five e-mails a day with editor (by the way, things are going very well!)
• prepare entries for local gallery show (and got accepted!)
• exercise regularly and continue to diet
• go on a ten mile bike ride–the longest since before I was pregnant with Eli who is now 11–and it wasn’t bad!!!! Reward:  ice cream! (SMALL cone)
• pay bills
• order supplies / items to sell when teaching in Houston
• help Joshua make a totebag/purse for his girlfriend…it was HIS idea!  (pictures and blogpost to come I hope)
• take Eli to buy binders etc. on school supply list
• take Joshua, Eli and J’s girlfriend to an amusement park (UGH) that is 2 1/2+ hours drive south of us; the good news:  it was SO HOT that after 3 hours, looking at looming thunderclouds, the kids asked “mom, can we leave and go to the Mall and do school clothes shopping instead.”  So we did… air conditioning, and three long road-trips (the only really big, really good mall in Maine–which would qualify as an average everday mall in the DC suburbs where I used to live–is near Portland and a 2+ hour drive from our house) turned into just one!
• prepare for dyeing fabric day with Frayed Edges (pictures and blogpost to come)
• have dyeing day with Frayed Edges and celebrate Kath’s birthday, dye shirts with Joshua and his girlfriend
• next day:  more fabric dyeing, including tie-dye with the teens and Eli
• massive house cleaning, including dragooning the entire family into the process.  House is somewhat less cat- and dog-hairy.  Sigh.
• start prepping kits for teaching classes in Houston
• start thinking about a few new samples for teaching in Houston
• prepare invoices for wholesale pattern sales to local store and for Middle school / Be Inspired quilt
• meeting with Middle School principal, who fortunately LOVES the Be Inspired, Panel 1, and is now all excited about fundraising again for the project, and (from previous efforts) can pay me some of the price on the first panel….hooray!  What a concept…getting paid!
• do all the paperwork (well, it was online but it is still paperwork) to be able to accept credit cards in Houston when I teach, order knucklebasher machine and credit card slips and metal imprint plate
• eat lunch with mom every week; she is still in assisted living, but her confusion grows weekly.  She is having an increasingly difficult time recalling names of things (including my kids…but she still asks about them every time…. sometimes every five minutes….), so sometimes it is a challenge to sit for an entire lunch that repeats the same few minutes of   conversation / answers to questions every few minutes, again and again.  I just remind myself the questions are new to her, even though she just asked them.  She can’t help it if she doesn’t remember…..I PRAY I take after my dad instead….
• take some time for myself, read Melanie Testa’s Inspired to Quilt (hope that will be a blogpost/review too)… it is excellent!
• try to keep up on e-mail; accept that I will never read all the blogs I would like to, or keep up with the news as well as I would like
• Revise “resources” section of the book
• List subjects for an index to the book

And that’s just the past two weeks or so….so that’s my excuse for no new blogposts!!!! Anyone wanna take a nap with me?

To do SOON:

• write next article for Machine Quilting Unlimited (www.mqumag.com) on Color / thread color
• prep more kits
• finish kids’ school clothes shopping, mostly locally
• prepare entry for Mancuso / PIQF show
• prepare entry for the Eye of the Quilter, a photography exhibit at Quilt Festival in Houston
• contact MORE magazines to see if they will accept an article proposal that will help promote the book
• think about book promotion… it should be out in late October/early November
• today:  lunch with Ma, grocery shopping, take Eli to Game Stop and WalMart, buy assorted stuff for house (like light bulbs and toilet paper!!!!!)
• clean house, again
• maybe another long bike ride when the heat wave breaks later this week…..
• get Nourish pattern prepped for printing, contact printer (hi Barbara!), and all that stuff so it is ready to take to Houston
• start some “slide show” stuff to use for class demonstrations for Houston classes
• prep more samples for Bindings class
• make pattern out of Little Brown Bird…send to Kay T. for testing, use for kits for Chunk and Jigsaw class in Houston….
• another nap sounds good; sipping a cup of tea and reading a novel sounds even better…sitting   on the settee on the back porch

OK…for the final installment of my Maine Quilts 2009 review, here are some quilts that I just thoroughly enjoyed.  I wish I had had enough time to snap a close-up of the labels to give proper credit to all the quilters!  Enjoy this last romp.  Next, I’ll give you some close-ups of the quilted version of Be Inspired…stay tuned!

Coastal Quilters (my local chapter) didn’t have as many quilts this year, but what we did have was wonderful…Mathea’s quilt of her husband and son was in an earlier post, and here is Louisa Enright’s glorious NY Beauty…she picked and chose from various patterns, drafted her own blocks, and designed the whole shebang…glorious!

The Coastal Quilters also had another fun, 10×10 inch Grab Bag challenge…you had to use EVERYthing (at least a little bit) of everything in your bag.  I suggested we also add a strip to show what we got so folks could understand where each of us began and where we ended up:

Another chapter, the Crazy Quilters, had a tea cozy challenge…think I can convince CQ to do that one year?

then, there are quilts I just plain liked.  One of the judges liked this one, too….and (oddly?) it had no regular ribbon, but DID receive (a well-deserved, I think) Judges’ Choice ribbon:

A Hawaiian style quilt that I loved:

And some fun other ones:

There didn’t seem to be as many art quilts this year in Maine Quilts, but I enjoyed the ones that were there!   From my friend Betty’s cat quilt (in the Cat’s Meow section—each year the show has a theme…last year was schooners, the year before lobsters, etc., this year the Maine Coon Cat):

To some of the quilts in the Art Quilts Maine section, there were some really wonderful ones.  AQM had a challenge:  black + white + one color… it was fun to see the results:

And down the aisle from my Be Inspired Quilt was Judy Anderson’s seals:

And Mathea Daunheimer’s quilt of her son and husband at the beach:

And some more quilts…alas I don’t know who made the lilies, but the tree is by Mary McFarland:

I’ll have one more post about the show in a few more days….

Jo Diggs has been at the forefront of the art quilt movement since there has BEEN an art quilt movement.  She lives here in Maine, and we are fortunate to have her nearby teaching and exhibiting.  This year, there was a special exhibit of some of her quilts.  I was suprised at the range of the subject matter and colors:  usually Jo’s landscapes are small, sometimes wool cloth, and lovely muted tones.  WOW was I inspired by her quilts:

When I saw her birch tree quilt, I thought why should I even try to make my “blue birches” quilt that has been hammering at the inside of my head asking to be  let out and made into cloth…..   I LOVE the sunset colors in hers.  I think I have just about talked myself back into making mine, telling myself that mine is just different…. but still…this quilt is close to perfection:

More on Maine Quilts in a few more days…

Last weekend was Maine Quilts, the annual show put on by the Pine Tree Quilt Guild (PTQG).  The judging this year was quite tough, with only five blue ribbons out of nearly 100 judged quilts.  Although I didn’t get much time to savor the show (the first day I took hubby, his first time ever going to a show with me…hoooray!…so I promised him we wouldn’t have to stay long—since it was torrential rain, it also ended up being crazy crowded, and the second day I got there late), I did have time to take pictures of the five blue ribbon quilts plus a couple of others.  (In theory, the photos should be clickable for a larger view.)

Here is the Best in Show quilt, a hand and machine appliqued quilt with a ton of quilting (Machine):

And the other blue ribbon winners, one of which also won a judges’ choice:

And of course, (blush, smile) mine:

I’ll have a couple more posts about the show… some of my favorites that I just snapped while breezing through, art quilts, and Jo Diggs’ special exhibit.  More soon!