Procrastination Complete

I'm not really procrastinating from anything now, and it's almost hard to remember how stressful and crazy life was last semester when I was trying to finish my Masters, but I'll always have this quilt to remind me..

Dubbed "Procrastination in Blue and Orange", it was pieced in a 36 hour period in February '11 when I took a much needed break from searching for a research topic.  I piece it, loved it, and promptly forgot about it as the chaos of grad school engulfed me again.  (click here for earlier posts about my process)
I took my time piecing the back, trying several creative layouts to make the most of stash fabrics before settling on one that incorporated our entire last name pieced in 4" high letters.  (sorry, no full pics.  The internet doesn't allow us that much privacy, but I can try). 

I quilted it according to my original plan, with only slight adjustments for the spirals in the center of each circlish-thing.

  I haven't washed it yet, but I love how it turned out.  I plan to bring this with us on our next trip to Greece and leave it in our house there (George's room, family room? we'll see).  Until then it looks pretty good in George's room here.. and he will need a second quilt on the bed soon.  God, it's nice to be able to make something so practical~

Other details:

Size-- roughly 60" x 80"
fabrics-- all from the stash, with some gifted from Shannon and Carolyn.  Stash fabrics here date back to '02 and there are triangles representing at least 9 other projects I've made over the years, including the blue & brown HST quilt we're doing for my month in the Two's Company Bee.
quilting-- quilted in yellow-orange verigated YLI thread, 40 weight.  It's my first time using it, and I'm not so sure I like the thickness of the thread, but the colors are awesome.
timeline-- started February 2011, completed November 18, 2011.

SAND

Letters complete!

We went to the beach on Sunday and George had a great time searching for shells.  He wouldn't hold still for a photo, so I took one of us instead.

When I tried to get C to pose and make a good shadow, this is what he did to me.. the Greeks give horns instead of bunny ears.  how romantic. (I have a photo of C doing this to his mom, I can only guess it's an affectionate gesture..)

The bulge is my purse, btw.  My butt is big, but not that big.

I'm experimenting with the gorilla pod I got for my birthday.  I was able to get a photo of both hands by attaching the camera to the buttons of my sweater.  Neat, huh?

I made this block for Tanya, for her month in the Rosey Little Bee.  I tried string piecing onto tissue paper and it worked pretty well, tearing off with ease.  Putting the 4 blocks together though was tricky, the bias edges (especially of the toile), stretched more than I was used to.  I have always left the paper on until after I pieced the whole top when paper/string piecing and it has always been a challenge to get the paper out of the seams, so I tried something new and .. i need to keep trying.  Shannon said something about piecing onto plain newsprint, has anyone tried it?

K, I & R

Chugging along at these.. 8 down, 4 to go.  The R was traumatic.. it took a looong time to get it to look like a recognizable R.  I'm still not 100% happy with it, but it's a learning experience and hopefully I'll grow from it.  The R I put on George's quilt was boxier, but I wanted a more angular look this time, to imitate the K.

XL

You know, I thought "X" would be easier..

AAA

These are:

• the grades I hope to get on my papers this semester (school's going fine, btw)
• the first letter of the alphabet that George can recognize by sight
• what happens when you try to spell out your long Greek last name for the back of your quilt (only 9 more letters to go!)

I got in a little quilting today.  I'm going to take these letters nice and slow and then piece them into the backing even though it means I might not get it basted or quilted til the spring.  So long as I'm at the binding stage by June, I'll be happy.

I spent some time updating the layout of my blog and adding "pages"-- I want to have photos of all my quilts in one place, but blogger is not making it easy for me to edit the page and put them in chronological order.  I think I have to go back and upload them in the order I want them to appear.  Pain in the ***

Clearing my head

Sometimes life starts to move really fast and really slow at the same time.  School started and I've got something like 110 pages to write (4 different papers) in the next 3 months.  Two of these papers don't have topics yet, and I've been racking my brain and scouring scholarly journals in the last few days to try to come up with something that (1) I like, (2) my professor likes, (3) and that I can reasonably write a 40+ page research paper on before graduation.  Easy enough, right?  But it wasn't.  Let's just say I was being a bit naive about the research aspect, and a couple of hours doing hard time in the University library basement has woken me up to that fact.   But it's ok.  Now I know.  And I can do it, I just need to choose a topic..
So my mind was racing.. but then on the other hand, the NYC Mod guild meeting was coming up and I had *shock!* nothing for show and tell!  I had been drudging along on an overdue X-mas present that I just wasn't feeling anymore.  I was sick of piecing stars.  Twice I went into the sewing room with time on my hands and I just stared around blankly, waiting for a project to tell me it needed to be done. 
Nothing.
There was an imbalance, too much on the school side, not enough on the quilting side.  I needed something to clear my head, to give me something to dive in and focus on. 
I was sorting through old emails (yes, that's how lost I was) and came upon a link to this blog, and this quilt.  And I remembered AmandaJean's recent post about creating a simple stash quilt once a month.. and I thought, I can do this.. I should do this.
So from Thursday afternoon to Friday night, I put all my energy here.

George helped me sort fabrics, I ironed and cut 10.5" squares in the family room as he played.  After he went to bed I drew diagonal lines, paired, pieced, pressed, cut them apart, & pressed again. 

Friday after he went to bed I squared them up (I was jotting down paper topic ideas at the same time), laid them out, and pieced them together.  I made a whole quilt top in a 36 hour time frame.  I don't think I've done that for a long time.  

I have affectionately dubbed this my "Procrastination Quilt #1"-- allowing room for future projects of the same nature.  And boy do I feel better. 

I showed it at the guild mtg yesterday and was happy to hear other quilters say that sometimes you just need that.. something big and quick, to play with forgotten fabrics, to do something completely out of line with your previous/current creative path.  The strange thing was that I had been deathly afraid of HSTs for, um, forever, until about last fall.  I could do them, but didn't like the process.  Making them very big and having them go together so easily has given me a new found admiration for the unit. 

Ok, the Metro Mod meeting yesterday was a blast, as usual.  I'll try to get pics and a recap up before school on Wednesday..