Saying goodbye to summer...

Labor Day sunset at North Beach (South Haven, MI)

Hard to believe that another summer's come and gone, but the season departed from the beaches of western Michigan with a weekend of truly incredible weather: not a cloud in the sky, mid-eighties, with a light breeze...everything would have been perfect had the air conditioning not quit here at the beach house yesterday afternoon, which made today pretty miserable -- inside, anyway. Let's just say the cat wasn't very happy; I, on the other hand, was enjoying my book (Eat, Pray, Love -- perfect long weekend reading) on the deck, basking in bad-for-me sunlight (rationalized by a recently discovered Vitamin D deficiency) and thoroughly enjoying the feel of something other than a desk chair under my behind.

And -- drum roll, please -- I dropped the 60th Anniversary quilt top off with the longarm lady this morning, and my elation is indescribable! The dark cloud of guilt that hovered over every project I worked on over the past year that wasn't this quilt (and if you read my earlier posts, there were several of those) has finally lifted, and my creative license has been renewed.

Anybody have any idea how long creative licenses are good for?

Checking one off the to-do list...

Auditioning the binding

At last! I can breathe a sigh of relief, I have finished my parents' 60th anniversary gift. Well, sort of. The top is done, and I'm leaving it with the longarm lady on my way up to northern Michigan in two weeks. I'd be more proud of myself for completing it if it weren't over a year behind schedule.

The Irish Chain is an easy pattern and this should have been a no-brainer, but several things made this a painful exercise to complete:

• Originally designed as an oversized throw, Mom decided last summer she'd rather use it on their bed. My fault for offering the option, but I wanted her to be happy with it. So it came back to Chicago to sit on the UFO pile. On the top, but still relegated to what's become the black hole of my kitchen.
• Making more blocks meant cutting into my backing fabric, and not having enough for a single-fabric back. Not the end of the world, but not what I had planned, either.
• One wedding
• One set of twins
• A baby girl on the way and her two cousins and grandma's fabric
• A new Bernina with BSR that warranted quite a bit of experimenting
• Several subsequent experiments
• Another new baby girl
• One deathly sick cat, slowly recovering
• New machine=different seam allowance, which means the new blocks were slightly larger than the old ones. I hadn't realized how off my old Singer and I were!
• I came up four inches (four inches!) short on the off-white fabric
• Discontinued fabric -- both the backing and the off-white. Thank you, quiltshops.com and your thumbnail searches!

So the lessons learned here are obvious:

• To begin with, I should just finish what I start
• Buy enough fabric (though in my defense, I did...originally)
• In the name of all that is creative, let some of those "ooh, I could make this!" moments pass and just get it done already!
• Start making their 75th anniversary quilt NOW.