not sewing, but some quiltiness

This past week has been a little less crazy, despite switching jobs.  The shifts are shorter, so I'm not as exhausted when I get home, but also, it's just a better place for me to be working.  Yay!

The cutting instructions for the Colour Value Mystery Quilt Along came out on Thursday, which meant I needed to kick my procrastinating behind in gear and get those fabrics washed!

(You can still sign up for the free quilt along - it's free for about another month - the link is what I've highlighted above.)

But I just couldn't get over the floral print.  It didn't fit.  I tried and tried.

Lily even helped - though I'm not sure she was encouraging me or discouraging me to use that print.  Either way, this is one of the few shots where she wasn't licking her behind, silly girl!

I caved in and went back to my local quilt shop and got an off-white grunge.  I should have done this a week ago, but...

Of course that meant the new fabric had NOT yet been washed, so that set me back a little.  I got that done on Friday, but the hubby had plans for the afternoon and I had to work Saturday and and and...

Finally on Sunday I got the pieces cut.  Since I'm doing the baby size, there wasn't a lot to do, which meant it went quickly.  If I had been planning a larger quilt, I would have probably procrastinated less.  Or not.  Who knows.

Now I have a few more days to relax before the first set of sewing instructions come out.

If any of you are on the fence, I know Joanne writes really great patterns with really great instructions, so I'd say just go for it!  Join us!

Oh, and I got to use these super cool clips my friend Carol got me for Christmas!

I didn't need all of them, but it was fun to break open the package and put them to use finally!  I'm sure they'll come in handy again and again, but I need to figure out a way to store them so they're in order the next time.  It was a little bit of a hassle to sort through all of them to find the letters I needed...  (So of course I threw them all back in the bag when I was done - lesson not learned!)

I finished two books this week also!

Set in the early 1960's in Sydney, Australia and then London, this is the story of a young woman who wants to be a newspaper journalist in a time when women just didn't do that outside of the women's pages.  She works hard to move up through the system and does it at a perfect time in history where women were gaining more access to roles previously reserved for men.

After proving herself in Sydney, she is sent to London to cover the marriage of the queen's sister when the guy who usually covers the royal family is out for an extended illness.  One things leads to another and she gets the job permanently.

In addition to the newspaper job story (which fades as the book moves along, sadly), she is witness to a mob murder early on in the book and it factors in far more than I anticipated, though in ways I wouldn't have expected.

And then there's the romance.  Ugh.  That takes over midway through the book where I would have much preferred to hear about her efforts to rise in the newspaper world.  There are two men: one is good, one is bad, but who is who flip flops some, but if you might want to read it, I'll just leave it at that.

It wasn't a bad book, but I was frustrated that the romance kinda took over for a while.

And then I flew through this one:

Having been made into a movie here in the US (the book originated in Sweden), starring no less than Tom Hanks, you'd be pretty likely to guess this is going to be good.

It was.

Ove is a grumpy old (though not that old) man.  He loses both his wife and job in a short period of time and decides he's ready to join her.  But his attempts at suicide all fail for one reason or another, creating friendships and loyalties along the way.  The story moves back and forth in time to tell his life story and it turns out he's always been grumpy.  He sees things in a very black-and-white manner and has little patience for those who don't.  His wife helped him see things differently, but she must have been an incredible person to not give up on him.

I enjoyed this one very much and finished it in just a few days.

Lily says I'm done typing now.  She's in my lap, trying to chew on my fingers while I type, so I guess she's right?  (The lemon pound cake is probably about done in the oven by now anyways...)

Happy quilting!

Katie