Monday Night Quilting

Yesterday, I went into my place of work, which happens to be a university.  It was a Sunday afternoon, and no one was around, but me and my pal Lindsay, who is learning to quilt.  We both brought our quilt tops and various other quiltesque accoutrements into an empty classroom that had the most wonderful four by eight foot tables.  We each pushed two of those tables together, so we both had glorious 8 foot square spaces to work on.  In all my years of quilting, this is the first time I have had that much space to spread out, without bending over on the floor.  It was seriously awesome!  It made the whole quilt sandwich construction thing a piece of yummy chocolate cake!  We used the spray basting, but as I am by nature a pessimist, we pinned, as well.  Lindsay was working on a sweet baby quilt from a Denyse Schmidt pattern, and I was assembling the Blue Meanies quilt, with a pieced backing that I'm not prepared to show at the moment.

Tonight I started quilting it.  I'm trying a sticks-and-boxes kind of effect, quite different from what I've done before.  We'll see how it turns out.  This is the part where I always feel a bit daunted at how much there is to do.  I filled four bobbins to begin, but was appalled to see how little acreage one bobbin's worth is.  Felt like I'd hardly made a dent.  Oh well.  We'll get there.

True Confessions

Two dark deeds to confess this morning:
1.  I disabled the link between Flickr and Facebook, where FB would show my recent posts to Flickr, so that my FB friends, which include some of my colleagues and students, wouldn't know how much quilting I have been doing.  I have had a number of "where do you find the time" comments, which can only truly be answered by "by not doing all the other things that need doing".  I think the only point of overlap now is my friend and lab manager, Lindsay, but, as well as being my enabler, she has her own time-sucking addictions.

2.  I was so distracted by other things that I forgot to register for Run for the Cure this year.  Only, this year, it would have to be Shlep for the Cure, since my knee is still too wonky to do any sustained running.  To mitigate this failing somewhat, I donated to the Australian Breast Cancer national fund via Julie at Bush Baby Jag.  Julie is also giving away some awesome fabric and other stuff, so virtue may be its own reward or it might get some help.