Fresh Market Madness

I have succumbed to Fresh Market Madness, which is now an official disease in my town. I went on the first day it opened, went back two days later to buy even more for a party we were having that night, and then stopped by the next day to buy meat on the way home from a party. Clearly, much of this is my way of dealing with the stress of my friend's death (on the day of her funeral I bought a giant blow-up snow globe for the lawn). Still, nothing beats tackling a quilt room cleaning and new project empowered by Peet's coffee and gourmet ginger cookies :) A guaranteed way to beat the blues. So, I have several photos to tell my story.

The first three are of my quilt space, half of a room I share with my husband's video and music editing system. What's extra nice is that the window directly overlooks the backyard, so that I can watch the kids play while I work. The project on the wall is done now and more pictures follow. I bought a bunch of stock cabinets to organize my life at my last house and they've come in very handy repurposed for the quilt room. I also used to have to keep all my fabric in the garage, hence all the labeled plastic bins. You can see all my dissertation materials on the shelf above my sewing machine; I use this same desk to write my diss in marathon multi-day sessions when I can manage some time away from work. That's Jack on the chair.








Earlier I mentioned that I was working on a new holiday quilt. I've called it "The Merriest" after a June Christy song on my Holiday iMix. It's kind of an abbreviated version of the APQ cover quilt this month. All of the fabrics, including the border, were in my stash, and I even had the black to white variegated thread that I used to quilt the border. I quilted the interior with looping squiggles in a bright variegated and the border with loopy-linked stars. The applique is simply iron on. The quilt is hanging next to the front door, so I couldn't see even machining it. I finished it today and then whipstitched the binding while catching up on TIVO'd Ugly Betty's. I really like it. There are four of each item because we're a four person family :) I also took a close-up of the quilting.