a sigh of relief

Now that the Christmas orders have shipped and things have quieted down I finally have some time to catch my breath. The tree is decorated, gifts are wrapped, and grocery shopping is done for the holiday meals.

I spent most of the day yesterday in my studio where I'm cleaning and straightening up. I've been sorting fabric scraps into piles—larger pieces for tissue cozies and sachets, smaller ones for patchwork. And finishing up all those three-quarters done embroidery projects so I can list the end results on my web site.

And about that baby quilt I've been working on for the past two months. The layers are together, the binding is attached, and I'm just about ready to finish up. I thought I'd quilt it on my sewing machine but it turns out that my machine can't handle that. Then I thought about hand-tying it and even bought the perfect shade of brown yarn to do that. But the new mom called yesterday (everything went well and it's really a boy!) and she thinks she may hang the quilt rather than use it in the crib. So, I'm going to revert to my original plan of "quilting" it with buttons. I have a bag of brown buttons that I bought on Ebay years ago—part of a box full of old factory stock from a clothing manufacturer in NYC. They'll be perfect. And I should be able to get them sewn quickly.



I'll deliver this in a couple of weeks when she's feeling up to visitors and when weather permits. I'm pretty happy with the results and may add some quiltmaking to my repertoire in the future. It's so labor intensive and I'm not sure there's a way to make any profit but it was fun anyway.