Long day at the polls, but relatively easy, too. It was a lovely space this time, and fabulous weather, and I got to do some writing planning, plus watched some Merlin.

This is the piece I did in the studio art class that just finished up today. She's a new incarnation of Sofia the Clockwork Engineer, and I think that this version of her is a character in the story I'm writing.


This is the 2009 Heritage Society Quilt Committee offering, called "The View from My Hammock". My mom did five, count 'em, five of the squares. Mom is awesome. I got a credit because I did some drafting and designing. I did not sew any of this quilt, though!

More from the Quilt Show:


Special highlights of interest to vermilionsun and shogunsquirrel under the cut. Hee. :)

( photos )

International Quilt Festival, Day 1:

Totally awesome!
I blew half my festival budget on amber jewelry, but the highlight of the show was still the quilts.

This one is pieced, not painted - I swear.  It's huge, taller than I am, and gorgeous in person. "Medea Escaping". 
My flickr set for the show includes the card for this one, and some detail shots.

Had a lovely crafty evening with Kim last night.  Found some fantastic Halloween accessories at Michael's that will make wonderful not-quite-so-tiny shrines, and achieved a significant amount on the quilt.
The quilting portion of the project is finished. Now I have only the binding and final touches before it is ready to send.  Yay!

I am so busy, in all aspects of my life, and it's funny the way that everything just gets more complicated. Luckily I have a really great workplace and a lot of resources for keeping my head above water.
There's a small list of urgent tasks I need to do in the next few days, but things have been made much easier by canceling some of my almost-scheduled out-of-town plans for this month and next.  Except for the RenFaire, there is now nothing on my plate requiring a large travel investment until the holiday season.

And plenty of time for crafty decompression.
(I hope!)

I still haven't finished the quilt.  Argh. Soon, though.  Soon.

Dad and I went to see Star Trek on the IMAX. It was pretty hilarious. I noticed lots of details I'd missed the last (10) time(s) I saw it.

Have now been mostly spoiled for the first episode of Series 2 of Merlin but I find I don't mind so much. Not sure if that will continue for the entire run, but what with having to wait two weeks for any opportunity to see it, a bit of spoilery speculation is fun.

Still running deadlines, and now I'm also pinch-hitting, which is fine but more deadlines. I thought I'd get to work on tiny shrines this weekend, but it's so not happening. Time to get some time-management going.

I've spent the evening quilting - yes, actually quilting!  It's been awesome, but I'm not sure I'll finish this project today...  close, but maybe not quite.

Here I am at my lunch break, thinking that I have not been doing much blogging lately.
Things have been happening, thoughts have been thunk, writing has not really happened but a lot of art has gotten done...

I've been calling on my parents a lot for help with the apartment, arranging and unpacking and such. I have some stuff from IKEA that hasn't yet come out of the box - perhaps I should have that Flat Pack Party after all.
I think that this evening I shall go buy a television at last, and maybe put some books away.

Lately I've had lots of meetings and Meet-ups and a seemingly overwhelming amount of volunteer commitments, mostly online. How did I end up working on two back-to-back cons? Urgh.
I haven't got a costume for any of them, either. Although I may go shopping for something to wear to the dances, at least. 
I'm test-running some less-demanding-than-Adobe art software on my Mini, so that I won't have to lug Ginevra and all of her expensive software to San Francisco for the art demo I'm supposed to do. Does anybody out there use openCanvas regularly?  Got any good tips? Tutorials?

Other randomness:
Read The Graveyard Book, and it was excellent. Haven't yet managed to finish any of the other books I took from the library. Rereading the Enchanted Forest Chronicles omnibus instead.
Ran through the entirety of Avatar: The Last Airbender again. The finale chokes me up, man. Beautiful stuff. I may need to get DVDs.
Still re-watching Merlin, too. I'm easy.
Really, really wish I had Ghostbusters  on DVD.
I've made a lot of grilled cheese lately.  Also used almost every pan I own. Now I just need to make cookies (or pizza) and I think I will have used all possible kitchen tools at least once.
Have made minor progress on the current quilt, but won't really get far until the sewing table stops being the "put everything down here when you come inside" table. Working on it.
Been keeping a better food diary for the past few days, along with a general journal. I've stopped trying to separate everything and am just keeping everything in one book now. This combined with regular check-in with the Wellness Counselor at Rice should help me get a better handle on things. I hope.

And that's enough for now. Lunch break is well over, and I have things to do.

Started the day by watching the Doctor Who Easter special. Yay! Full of win!

Then collected my quilt-in-progress, the printer fabric and my thumb drive with photos and decamped to the ancestral home where there was a color printer.  Printed my photos.  Hung out with the folks for a bit.
Went to my aunt's house for family holiday hanging out, which was mainly lots and lots of conversation in the kitchen, a great meal and much grazing after, and fun gaming experiences.  Someone had a game about Urban Legends with Truth or Myth cards, and we played that a bit, then several rounds of Outburst.

It was a nice time.
Now I am home and have more maintenance issues for the mgmt to address come the AM, but mostly things are fine. Still largely chaos, but there have been a few more boxes unpacked and some things re-arranged.
Also retrieved yet more stuff from the ancestral home, yay.

Have yet to finish a piece of digital art here, but I have a deadline looming so I should get something together.

I can't unfold the table all the way yet, but I've put the border on the quilt and now I'm working on finishing the back piece and sandwiching them together.  Exciting! 
This is gonna happen! I'm gonna finish in time for my trip!

Photos will be posted when it hits its new home. I'm taking lots.  Look forward to showing you!
Hm. I should take a photo of my workspace, too.  LOL - there are boxes everywhere, but I'm just sewing and ironing around them.   Heh. 

Unpacking books seems like a foolish endeavor when I have no shelves upon which to place them.  Hmmm.

I could run over to the Central Market and Bed, Bath and Beyond to get some of the things I still need.  (A spatula would really come in handy.)
I'm out of rice cakes! This is a tragedy.

I made tea today in my kitchen for the first time, using the kettle Mom bought me and the teabags she sent from home.  I should probably acquire my own tea at some point. And a teapot.

Tummy troubles continue, with possible hypoglycemic symptoms, but they are usually mild and quite possibly psychosomatic. My anxiety can level me faster than anything else, it seems.  Need to work on that meditation thing.

I've been reading actual books and paper media, though. Mostly nonfiction - some "making a magical home" stuff, some "environmentally sustainable cleaning" ones, and ODE magazine. Also the interviews in Weird Tales.

Now I'm hip deep in the con Access database, running some reports for the Chair, and pondering the reality that ConCom members don't really *attend* their con as such. 

Also, I'm on programming for a Con next weekend.  The panel is about Social Media. I will have very likely just finished a report and formal action plan on the topic for work. My life is funny that way.

I want to get to a point today where I can get the sewing machine table set up and finish the sandwich construction phase on the current quilt.  If I do that much, there's every chance that I could manage the quilting before I go to New York. But I still don't have a printer set up and it's blotchy when it runs. Can't print photos with it until I figure out what's up with that.

Also, for those keeping track, I'm up to Episode 1.09 of Avatar: The Last Airbender and I <3 Sokka SO MUCH! :D

Well, shortly after my previous post the lights and outlet power in the apartment just tanked completely. The AC is on its own circuit so it was fine, but I sat around with the laptop until the battery died and then with a book and a flashlight until I went to bed.
Maintenance is supposed to be doing another parts replacement this morning, and we'll see if that changes anything.

I may end up schlepping the sewing machine back to the ancestral home, because I have so many busy weekends coming up (including a Con next weekend) that I am starting to think it will be impossible to finish the quilt before my NYC trip.

The Alliance For American Quilts:

Crazy for Quilts: a contest for quilters of all ages that honors the spirit of the crazy quilt.

Entry Deadline: June 1, 2009

Theme

Crazy for Quilts! entrants are encouraged to draw inspiration from one or more aspect of the crazy quilt: design, color, fabric, surface embellishment, history or some other aspect of this style that you want to celebrate. There's room in this contest for all kinds of crazy-from traditional approaches to art quilts.

The only constraints are that the finished quilt be 16" x 16" in size (2009 is our 16th anniversary), and the final result must consist of three layers.

Hm. I don't have a quilting icon!  Tragedy!

Happy Pi Day!

Last night I went to see Jonathan Coulton with Paul & Storm, of whom I had never really heard before last summer, nor ever seen perform, whether on youtube or live.  It was a really fantastic performance with lots of humor and audience interaction. Paul and Storm's opening show had me falling over laughing. Jonathan broke a string on his guitar in the first song, then later discovered his mouth harp was in the frame backwards. It being Friday the 13th, he joked, of course things went a bit awry. But none of that really interfered with the show, or the music. I could have done without the hair-flinging, loud-singing guy sitting one row down from me, but every concert-goer has crosses to bear, and as concerts go a hair-flinging, loud-singing obnoxious dude is better than drunken groping or being fallen on.
At one point near the end the entire balcony was doing Thriller-type zombie gesturing from their seats while shouting "All we want to do is eat your brains." Yeah. Nerds in groups. I should have taken photos. (The few I did take will be posted later, mostly of House of Blues itself.)
I went out with a party of six folks from the Houston SFF community, all active con-goers or organizers. We had dinner first with a few of them, then met at House of Blues downtown, where there were a bunch of other local nerds that folks in my party knew.  We ended up with seating right near each other in the balcony, oddly enough.
After the concert, we all went to a diner/coffeehouse on Westheimer and had food and drink and conversation until after midnight.  I did not get back to my car (I'd been ridesharing to avoid the downtown/midtown parking crunch) until 1:30 am. 
I haven't had a night out like that in quite some time, so it was pretty awesome.

Today I woke up at an ungodly hour to take care of my unruly stomach (it's pretty much a clockwork alarm all on its own - 6:25 am it wakes me without fail, just before my alarm.  I nibbled on a rice cracker and some orange juice and chatted with mom for a few minutes, then crashed again. I got up for real at about 11, and looked soberly at the packing I should be doing...  and turned away.
Instead, I cut some batting and the backing fabric for the quilt in progress, pinned it all together and trimmed it, and now I'm working on attaching the border pieces to the front before getting in there with the machine quilting.
Ideally I would like to have this finished in time to take it to New York at the end of April and present it to the recipients in person. I may not finish it before I move, but I'll definitely try to get as much done as possible before then, and keep the pieces in a separate box so I can find them pronto in the new place.

I just finished giving the kitchen floor a sweep and clean and mop, so I'm taking a sit-down break in front of a fan to type this up. My only minor angst today is that I really wanted to watch Ghostbusters while I did my sewing but I couldn't find the DVD.  I am pretty sure that I actually bought my own copy, but I could be mistaken. (Sorting out my stuff from the family stuff will be such fun!)  I put on The Last Unicorn  with Real Genius in the bullpen instead. 

Ok, and Dad just told me a joke he heard on Prairie Home Companion and I didn't know enough about music to get the pun in the punchline without clarification. FAIL.  :P   He needs to tell it to Peter.

Good: finished the quilt top, except for the photos, which can be put in later on top of the quilting.
Bad: couldn't print the photos because my printer is borked and full of blots, and the parental printer is out of color ink.  D'oh.

But it was a good day for progress.
Had a mediocre weekend health-wise, with some downs and some okays, and even this afternoon when things were really good.
Did not go to the art museum, but will hopefully get that in soon. 
I need to start making some lists in anticipation of my move, whenever that ends up being.

Haven't finished my art for Wednesday yet. Coming up on a series of deadlines now, plus I'm now signed up for THREE Big Bangs in a row this summer.  Geez. Not only is it con season, but I've signed up to illustrate novellas in two fandoms.  Fun times, indeed. ;)  At least there isn't any active overlap in production time, nor any crucial overlap with my travel times.

And now, snack time then bed, with fanfic. Yay fanfic.

I have been caught in a vortex of never-ending meetings/meetups since last week. Not a bad thing necessarily, just so incredibly busy.  And I run from work to class or other meetings or to run important family errands and suddenly my to-do list is a mile longer than usual and I am just tired.
But today is Watercolor class and after that there is nothing but actually catching up on all the work stuff that doesn't involve meetings and no more meetups and then maybe I'll get to breathe because dude Friday is my birthday and I don't want to have any more meetings!  (Although if it doesn't rain I'm hoping for another picnic in the park.)

Also, the cat has been sleeping on my quilt-in-progress and you can all congratulate me on womanfully not throwing things at him to get him to remove himself.  Rowr!

p.s. My presentation went really well!

A Joyous Imbolc to all - may good things grow from here.

I fail at weekend productivity, mostly.  Although with the assistance of Fabric-Stash Enabler Mom, I did acquire some smokin' awesome additions to my stash (and the things I actually needed for my current project) during a trek through Houston's southeastern neighborhood fabric stores.  We should learn that in most cases, we will find fun novelty fabrics at the chains, but for quality color/value cottons, going directly to The Painted Pony would save some time and money.  ;)
The only thing we didn't find was the Hoffman Challenge fabric. It's on some of the online retailers, but not yet in stores around here. We'll wait a bit and check back.

We also went to the uber-awesome catfish joint and scored a party platter overflowing with hushpuppies. WIN.

I did not actually get the fabric washed, although that's probably good as now it has bonus cat hair to wash off, too. Apparently my quilting table is Zephyr's new favorite nap spot.

Suffered through the Sunday blahs and Sunday night insomnia, which really made for a grand morning today.  Ugh.  Did manage to get my iTunes playlists transferred to Sofia at last, and got rid of most of the repetitive entries in the Library. Also acquired hotel accomodations for both ApolloCon and WorldCon. w00t!

Did some art, including laying in colors for the commission portrait for llnm. Finally. It'll take several more color layers to get it done, and I'm not sure that I'm happy with the chosen palette, but the nice thing about digital is that I have a great amount of control over individual colors. Did not do any writing.  Did a lot of reading, both of the fanfic and regular variety. I finished Skulduggery Pleasant (hey! It has a sequel!) and have gotten firmly addicted to The Stepsister Scheme.

Lalala. I think that was it. I got the feeling there was some kind of nation-wide sports event going on, but it never really got onto my radar. I will probably catch up on the cool movie trailers over the course of the next few days.

Look what my friend Keet made for me!
He's keeping Luna company on my office desk now.

:D

Hoffman Challenge - Inspiring Fabrics for Quilt and Fiber Artists:

Every year, a team from Hoffman Fabrics chooses an upcoming fabric design, and then issues a challenge to quilt, clothing, accessory, and doll makers to create original items using the fabric. The challenge curator and a group of assistants jury the entries, and then a team of judges selects the award winners.

The 2009 Challenge fabric and optional coordinates are available on a PDF on the web site, until the team updates the site.

Who wants to play?  Take a look at last year's rules and entries for ideas.  It's not just quilts, but dolls, accessories, and clothing in the juried collection.

Excited? Me? Never.

See you tonight.  :D