Back In the Saddle Again....

I am finally back!  I've been away all Fall because I had taken an income tax preparation course in the hopes of getting work for the upcoming tax season.  I thought I'd be able to take the course (3 hours a day, three days a week) and still quilt.  But between the extra time spent after class reviewing concepts with my classmates and then the need to commit to a lot of study time, at the end of the day, I really didn't have the head space left for quilting. Then Superstorm Sandy wound up extending our course an extra week.  After I passed the course came another two week nail biting period waiting to be called for an interview.  So far, I haven't been hired so now I really want to get back to the quilting -- both to bring my life back to normal and to take my mind off the waiting.

Compounding all that was the fact that I had a couple of home dec projects I wanted to get out of the way before focusing on the quilting and I had a very long list of all the UFOs I still want to try to get done before year's end (yeah right!).  Now I am really feeling all the missed machine time.  So after knocking out two of the home dec projects earlier this week, the first quilt project is up -- finishing Floribunda!

The quilt stitching is my kryptonite -- it's the one part of the process that I'm most unsure of and usually procrastinate on. Which is funny since I set out to be a machine quilter from the time I started quilting and have always quilted my own quilts (over 40 to date).  Actually now, it's not so much the actual stitching that I fear but choosing a good stitch design and finding the balance between enhancing the quilt and what I am capable of executing at my current skill level.

I wasn't too scared of this one:  It was only lap quilt-sized, I had already picked an all over stitch design for it, the fabric prints and block design used in the top were busy enough to hide a lot of sins and I already had my thread picked out.  So I did some practice sketching and quilt samples and then got it on the machine.

I got a little more than a quarter of it done today so figure I should be binding it by Friday at the latest!  Yippee Ki-Yay (and with work continuing, I don't need that last part)!