OFF TO MINGLE...HO HO HO!!!

Tonight is momentous...I am going to a Christmas quilt guild meeting!  The lone wolf quilter is looking for a pack at last.

On the schedule for tonight is a potluck dinner, gift exchange and a speaker.  I will finally meet real life quilters, flesh and blood folks who might be as obsessed as I am.  It would be nice to know I'm not all alone.  I mean, I know all my cyber-quilting friends are "real", but sometimes its just not the same, you know.

My contribution to the potluck is a blackberry cobbler, my Granny Clarke's recipe.  It's what we call a the "One Fruit Cobbler", i.e. one stick of butter, one cup of flour, etc.  It is probably one of the most delicious desserts around.  Granny's motto was to KISS her food (keep it simple, silly) and it really works for this cobbler.

My gift is Triangles on a Roll--wrapped in a Christmas plaid homespun fat quarter...I actually parted with fabric...it can be done.  ALERT THE PRESSES!  I'd like to have it, so I figured other people would like it too.  Looking at my package, I understand one of the reasons I enjoy being crafty: its so things look like I want them to look.  Glossy, sleek, polished--its not me.  I like things home-y, crafty, warm and approachable...I want what I give people to have a tiny piece of me in it.

So it's off to be social, I am.  I'm NOT unsociable, I'm just a little shy at first but sometimes I appear to be stand-offish so I don't get approached which makes me more stand-offish...vicious cycle.  Let's hope this is a win, because I need friends who like to do what I do.

New Blog, first post...

Creativity gives me joy, whether it be sewing, scrapbooking, writing, composing, cooking...whatever.--Why?  Because I can...LOL, no really...it's because I'm driven to create something, anything.  The only problem is that I'm a process junkie.  It's never been the destination when I'm in the throes of whatever muse has me by the throat, its the journey.  Which is why I have so many flimsies, UFOs, partial scrapbooks, snippets of prose and song lying here and yon.  I'm okay with that BUT my family isn't.  They want their quilts and their scrapbooks and their cook books, etc., and they're tired of waiting. 

While surfing the web to find a longarm quilting service, I stumbled across Bonnie Hunter's Quiltville.  Her string piecing tutorial looked fun, so I bookmarked her and went about my business.  Then I was trying to figure out how to size setting triangles for a quilt I wanted to set on point...Google took me back to Bonnie.  Ways to organize my stash?  Bonnie again!  I had kind of given up on the quilting thing for a while until I found the website.  The Easy Street mystery caught my interest and I decided to go through my fabric again and OH!  the flimsies I found.

I decided to buckle down and start sending the flimsies out for quilting.  I found a wonderful long arm quilter, Debra Pugh at the Quilters Touch in Missouri who isn't fussy if every seam isn't straight and pressed or whether the border was obviously sewn by a beginner.  She thinks every quilt deserves to be quilted and she did a marvelous job on my first two.

Here's Allyson's quilt--started in 1999 and finished last month:

And then Sara's is all done too, started in 2000 and finished a few days ago:

My goals for 2013 are to have all the flimsies quilted, join a guild, attend some classes and get rid of all my crumbs and strings.  Along the way, I'm going to do mysteries, blog and keep enjoying the process with maybe a FEW products to show for it.

Later and happy creating!