Secret Agent Spy Stuff

It's been deliciously quiet here, so I have been quiet on the blog. The days have been filled with the satisfyingly mundane chores of everyday life. Nothing to see here. Little things give me ridiculous pleasure, like having a clothes chute from the master bedroom to the basement laundry, but are hardly worth a blog post. (Well, except for this one, I guess.) My days are a lovely mix of quilting, knitting, spinning and cooking. I have finally embraced this gift of unregimented time, this sabbatical from the frantic pace of teaching/travel/publishing of the past decade or so.

The weather has been unseasonably warm, autumn has lingered well into winter. They are predicting some measurable snow for over the weekend, so I'll be hustling to get the last of the tulip and daffodil bulbs into the ground later today. I'm down to the last forty or so, which shouldn't take long. I've already planted nearly a hundred bulbs. This spring there will be color!

A Fine Romance did get put aside for a while. There are other things that I'd like to get cracking on, and there were a couple of deadlines to be met, for projects I can't show you. I've sent off a block to Quiltmaker for their 100 Blocks publication. I really like it and think it needs to be quilt, so I will be fussing around with layouts until I find one I must make.

I've also been messing about with some new machine quilting techniques. I can't show you that either just yet. I can tell you it's been the most fun I've had with my clothes on. After years of swearing that I'd never wear gloves for quilting (when will I learn that "never" usually means "next week"), I've discovered that gloves are just the thing for this new process.

I still hate having to take the gloves off to thread the needles or even work the touch screen on the sewing machine. Until someone makes quilting gloves with the special conducting fibers in the fingertips, I've solved the problem by cutting the tips from the thumb and index fingers on my right hand glove. It also serves up a bit of cooling. Since my inner child is playing with matches again, any cooling I can get is a good thing.