Hooray updates! Yesterday afternoon, on the way home, I asked myself the question that often -- OFTEN -- leads to trouble:  "Okay, so I've cleared lots of the little projects out of the way. What big beast can I tackle tonight?"

I thought about Miss Pretty Primrose, and scratched my head. Hmm. Well, my objection has been that I'd never attempted to do a full-sized quilt on my machine at home, but I had such a horrid experience at the rented longarm quilt machine last time that maybe I should just tackle it.

The sign of doom is when I shift from saying "Oh I should do that sometime" to "Here's how I'd start." When I start laying concrete plans, it's over, buddy.

There. Two quilts out in two days. No, I didn't complete them, start-to-finish, in two days, but they're leaving my house within 48 hours of each other -- and yes, Tenzing is royally displeased. How did you know? Oh, previous photos. Right.

So here's the wrap-up on two quilts:

['Get thee hence!']

Crayon Box heads to South Carolina, to live with Scott Johnson. He had a good bit of input into its final construction; he chose the size as well as the backing/binding, a very dark, foresty green color. It goes in the mail this afternoon, so I feel pretty justified in calling it "completed" on the quilts page.

So, want to feel like you've done a Mariner's Compass star block, and an obnoxiously complicated one at that, without actually going through the effort of doing so? Thanks to my handy-dandy digital camera, now you can! (Full flickr photoset is available here.)

So say you've started off by designing a star you think is complicated but nifty in Adobe Illustrator. You extend out lines so you know how to cut fabric for the negative space around the star, and then print out one quarter of the star, like this:

Some people have a bucket list. I get the general idea but I find the approach depressing. I'd rather think of the process of life instead of focusing on its endpoint; as a result, I refer to my list as a Life List.

#5: Successfully complete a Mariner's Compass quilt.

I accomplished a few things on my life list in 2009, and as we well know, the only thing I like better than adding things to a list is crossing something off of a list, so I've been eyeballing #5 for a while. After Adam announced his engagement, I realized his wedding quilt was likely to be as good an opportunity as any. Here was a friend who took a great deal of pleasure in subtle things that were carefully made; even two seconds' worth of thought told me that something with right angles and straight seams just wasn't going to do.

Sunday afternoon. I've done almost no sewing this week; I've been mentally drained out of proportion to my actual physical tiredness. Jeff and I took our first stab at geocaching yesterday with mixed results, but we intend to try again; today we caught a morning matinee of 'Sherlock Holmes' and then made a quick grocery run before heading home.

Jeff sleeps right now, having stayed up a good chunk of the night while the storms were rolling through. The cats, fed, are hunting for warm places to nap. A good Sunday, overall.

I am nearing the time of final assembly on Lost in Translation, which is now definitely Tim's quilt. I've decided to make a great, grand usage of the last of the fabric I've been using for the square centers; I'll post photos when I have them.

Let me be clear. I have serious technolust for this Punctirus jewelry, but I don't believe it's available for sale yet. Originally seen at Art. Lebedev:

I can has shiny?

Every person who makes any sort of craft, and gives those crafts away as gifts, hopes those items will go on to have long, useful, and productive lives after they've left the crafter's hands. I got a bit of a preview tonight:

I'm far enough along on Discothèque that two photos placed side-by-side give you an idea of what I'm attempting to do. The plan is to have six columns of color, with each column fading from

to

Missing: the red-orange column and the black-and-white column. The bonus? Cutting out the background pieces for a Drunkard's Path pattern means you end up with smaller pie-shaped pieces that can be used for another quilt.  I'm thinking that one will look very different: brightly colored circles floating on a neutral (white?) background.

Discothèque doesn't know it yet, but she's going to have a baby sister. No idea what to name it, though. Ideas, anyone?

I'm hoping nobody minds that I do this, because this is old news to anyone who has been reading my sporadic entries this year, but I wanted to make a single, combined post about my quilt 'star stories' for an online quilt festival.  It seems there is an online quilting community, of which I am not really part of.  Perhaps it is time.

The rules for the quilt festival ask that we write a post about our quilt that we're entering, and provide photos.  The problem is that I've done this already, in two separate posts.  Forgive me if I combine the two of them together to tell the story of 'star stories' in a single post.  It, and plenty of photos, are after the jump.

I haven't exactly been sewing much since I got back from the Vacation + Furlough Extravaganza. I know this shocks no one, myself included, but it's taken me longer to bounce back from this trip than the previous ones.  My urge to lie on the couch and soak in the quietness that is home is difficult to ignore. Friends can vouch; they've seen little of me.

My sewing machine has missed me, too.  It's been waiting for me to come back and finish Asai's quilt.  I'm actually pretty close; there is a nonzero possibility that I could get very close, or finish entirely, with a diligent weekend's worth of work.

['See? It looks planned!' original photo on flickr. Full photoset here.]