Yes, I've been a bad, bad blogger.

Life is good, I've just been crazy busy.  I've been working, quilting, sewing, teaching sewing, gardening, working on my house, and serving on a very active PTA board for the first time in addition to my wife and mother responsibilities.  Sixth grade has been a major transition for my daughter, but she is doing really well in school and I'm so proud of her.

Photo from and great article Boston.com

The drought and weather here in Texas has been completely devastating. We've had the hottest and driest year in Texas history. Wildfires, dead and displaced cattle and livestock, withered crops, and parched soil. It's really heartbreaking and the outlook isn't good. Forecasters tell us the situation isn't going to improve anytime in the foreseeable future. I'm trying to think of something positive to end this paragraph with, but I'm completely at a loss. The impact of 2011 on our landscape, lives, and economy will be profound.

On a happier note, I finished a quilt! This is the quilt I started in my previous post. It's completely over the top and I just love it. This quilt is for my cousin's gorgeous daughter, Teagan. I wanted to make something as delightful as her smile.

I quilted it with bright colors of Perle cotton and tied it with some hot pink for a little extra hold. Everything except the binding is dots. I was surprised at how easy it was to pull a dots quilt together from my stash. I must have a serious love of polka-dots. 

Teagan evidently really likes her quilt and I hope she gets years and years of use from it.

So, if you are reading this, I'm guessing you haven't deleted me from your blog reader due to inactivity. I'm going to make an effort to post more regularly and I've got lots of fun things to post about. It's good to be back.   

So easy it's like cheating. Oh, wait, it is.

I think this was the easiest quilt I've ever made!

I used less than a yard of my Cheater Friday fabric and some Kona Ash (2.5" sashing strips) to make this quick quilt Wednesday night. It measures about 38" square.

Being iced/snowed in for four days now has got my creative juices flowing. We got another 4" of snow last night and it's still coming down this afternoon. It's snowmageddon 2011! It's the snowpocalypse! Whatever it is, this weather is crazy!

I need to be working on real work, but playing is so much more fun. Maybe I need to recolor the cheater print into a girly version and a boy version. Any other ideas for another color way? Maybe I just need to work on some new prints entirely. But part of me wants to continue the set-up of my jewelry studio in the basement. And there's so much quilting to be done. And then there's the snow. It's so pretty I just want to sit by the window with a book and a mug of hot chocolate and watch it fall. Decisions, decisions.

Don't forget about the giveaway in my previous post and thank you for all the kind comments about the shop. The shop still needs a lot of work (I fixed the typos in my bio, but I don't know what's wrong with the international shipping yet), but I'm glad I just did it. I've already shipped out a few FQs and I've got some jewelry going out today. You guys are the best! 

Wordless Wednesday