Denise, if you’re reading, please stop now! A photo of your swap quilt is below.

So I finally finished the December STUD (Swap Til You Drop) mini quilt for Kim, but I couldn’t send it for a week because the one and only camera in the house was on vacation with my mom. I mean literally on vacation – on a Caribbean cruise. Without me. And we got another 14″ of snow and had a cold snap with several days where we didn’t go above 0 degrees. Farenheit. Our lowest daytime low was -20. (For all of you Celsius readers (all?!?) that’s -29 degrees. Add the wind chill, and it felt like -27 (that’s -33!). And I had to shovel. Remind me again why I live in Wisconsin?

Now that the camera is back and I’ve thawed a bit, I can finally post photos. The swap theme was Sweet, Sour or Savory. Originally I was going to do four yellow and brown pineapple log cabin blocks and call it Pineapple Upside Down Cake. I promised to send a recipe with it, and that’s a great one. I designed it in EQ6, colored it, and then worked 12 days in a row and couldn’t work on it.

Next time I looked at the Flickr group, I saw three pineapple quilts, and that just wouldn’t do. Mom actually suggested the new pattern – Pickle Dish. Kim likes green and brown together, so I pulled a bunch of greens and wonderful dark brown marble, and came up with this:

I’m calling it Chocolate Covered Pickles. Sounds scrumptious, hmmm? While I’m not too thrilled with the idea of chocolate covered pickles, I do occasionally eat peanut butter and dill pickle sandwiches. Still, I couldn’t send that recipe, so instead I printed off my two page monument to Chicken and Dumplings.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on the next swap – January’s theme is Sing It, Watch It, Read It, so books, movies, music, etc. are the inspiration. I have a lot of sources of inspiration – figure 1,000 books, 800+ albums (CD, tape, or vinyl), and 200 movies. Still, I had a hard time coming up with something that I could translate into a quilt. Part of the problem is that I’m not a big applique fan (I like how it looks, I just don’t want to do it), so it couldn’t be anything that required literal replication. I settled on a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay called First Fig:
My candle burns at both ends,
It will not last the night.
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light.

And this is what I’ve done for the quilt top:

I still have to quilt it and that will be a challenge because there are a lot of seams. The finished quilt is about 12″ and each square is 1″.

I’ve received my quilt from my January swap partner already, and it’s inspired by the song Mockingbird (sung by James Taylor and Carly Simon). Oddly enough, I had seriously considered taking my quilt inspiration from the book To Kill a Mockingbird. Anyway, it’s the cutest little birdcage quilt:

I have two days off this weekend (well, Sunday and Monday), so I hope to finish it up and get it in the mail soon.