Mail In, Mail Out

Woohoo, my manuscript is off to the publisher!!! What a relief. Of course that was just the manuscript, the illustrations, photos, and samples. I still have plenty more to send them by the end of the month, including a quilt I'm currently hand-quilting and two that need binding.

Still I'm done with some of the horrible monotonous stuff, like creating a number for every illustration and photo and placing those consecutively in the manuscript. What a lot of work that I never knew had to be done. Luckily I got a one week extension, otherwise I think I might have lost my mind.

One stumbling block was iPhoto losing nine months worth of photos. (I'm blaming that on you, Snow Leopard. How could you embarrass me this way, especially after all the grief I gave my dad over his 2-weeek upgrade to Windows 7?). Thank goodness I recovered those, even if they are incorrectly dated and scattered around. Fingers crossed, I think I'm set now, although I have something like eight copies of every photo and no idea how to get rid of them.

Next month, I'm hoping to be a much more relaxed camper and more frequent blogger. After I got home from the post office, I discovered a reward for my hard work. A belated Christmas present: gorgeous fabric from Chris Daly of Dye Candy. It's overcast (not to mention cold) here so I didn't take great photos, but I wanted to share these incredible colors:

And here's the whole bunch:

Chris kindly sent me some samples last year so that I could find out how well these fabrics hand-quilted. The answer was marvelously - the fabric has a tight weave but wonderful to work with. I didn't stick with ordering one of her already packaged groups, but instead picked a bit of this and that so I could fill in some of the gaps in my hand-dyes/solids collection. My shelf is looking much brighter and lighter now:

Remember how I bought myself some future prezzies at the big quilt show in November? Mmm, yummy handwovens from India. The solids are shot cottons with two colors running through them. They don't appear to be flimsy, which is marvelous. Just wish there'd been more to choose from.
Especially now that both Jackie and Wanda are playing with older Kaffe Fassett prints that I didn't buy back when I had the chance. I'm kicking myself now.

I know, I know... like I need any more fabric...

Clare and Michele are challenging liberated quilters to make a quilt for the Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative. Please, check it out and participate!

Meanwhile, I have to stop goofing off and get back to work. Happily for me, that means lots of hand-quilting right now. I can finally get caught up on my tv watching. Ya'all take care.