I am here! I feel good! I want to BLOG!

It’s been a challenging few months for me, for no reason that has any real weight. I mean, my life is pretty good. I have a good home, people who love me, a decent job, good health, a fabric stash to die for, and cats. Despite all of that, I still have bouts of four-year-old-itis, as in “I don’t want to and you can’t make me.” I’ve felt it lifting in the past couple of weeks, and I’ve pottered around in the background of the blog, working myself back into it. I went through the Resources page and cleaned up all of the links, removing those that were broken and unfixable, and adding a few more resources, especially in the fabric designers free patterns section. Parts of it were rather outdated, since I started that page over five years ago and a lot has changed. Still, there’s a lot of good info there, so check it out if you haven’t already.

Another change I made was cleaning up the many pages I have. I removed the main My Quilts heading and moved that and the sub pages under About Me. Those pages will need further editing, but I’ll leave them along for now because I have more interesting things to do.

Interesting thing #1: I’m adding an EQ Projects sub page under the Patterns page for EQ project files. One of the awesome things about Electric Quilt is the ability – even encouragement – to share your files with other EQ7 users. It allows us to play with the coloring of a quilt quickly and easily, or add or remove blocks for a larger or smaller quilt, or change the layout, or change the size of blocks and have the program calculate yardage and rotary cutting instructions in the new sizes. If you’re an EQ user, be sure to check out the page! All of the EQ project files are free for your use, and a few of the projects also have links to instructions that I’ve written. Not all of the project files are linked yet, but they’ll be there in the next day or so.

Interesting thing #2: Kelli just sent me an email through the blog (when I say “just” I mean I was literally in the middle of writing this post!) asking if we had more Test Your Skills Sampler instructions available. I promised her I’d finish it by my birthday on April 23. Are you laughing? Stop it! I really want to finish this, and there’s only a little bit left to do. It’s kind of embarrassing. No, it’s a LOT embarrassing.

Interesting thing #3: I’ve mentioned before that I wrote Block of the Month projects for the Stitch & Bitch group that gets together at our house every month. We were working on a Botanical BOM that, like many other quilty-related things, stopped progressing for a year. Yes, I wrote a YEAR. It’s been a long, dry spell, folks. Anyway, after a few gentle prods from my cousin Sharon I finally sat down this weekend and finished all of the block instructions, as well as notes for finishing the quilt in four different settings. I haven’t written the setting instructions yet, but the rest is all good to go, completely written, PDF’d, finished. All of the blocks are traditional blocks with a plant theme (hence “Botanicals”), and all are in the public domain, so I am going to share the BOM on the blog. It will be a true block of the Month, with instructions posted on the first of every month starting today. Yes, the SECOND of February. What? I’ll include instructions for all four, possibly five, settings chosen by the members of our Stitch & Bitch group, and I’ll post illustrations of those settings on the first post with fabric requirements.

Wow, no photos so far. Kind of sad. So here are some pictures of my cats: