Headway!

After a fall devoted to baby, baby, baby, it feels really good to be getting back to normal programming: UFOs and other commitments. And this weekend, some headway was made.

I'm part of the Give a F*ck Challenge put together over at Completely Cauchy. Yes, I am! Chawne contacted me about this idea when I was in my most seething, tied-up-in-knots state in the late fall and it seemed like an idea tailor-made for me right then. I don't have an inordinately pottyish mouth, but there are times... And late fall of 2011 was definitely one of those times for me. I couldn't sign on fast enough.

The idea was to contribute a quilt block containing the F-word, pieced or appliqued. After auditioning fonts for some days (I have a wonderful Word document with pages and pages of gigantic renditions of the F-word in about 8 different fonts. Sometimes it does me good just to look at them...), I settled on the font Whimsy, and did a quick fused applique. The block goes in the mail today. Or tomorrow, seeing today's a federal holiday.

By the way, Chawne's blog offers endless inspiration for quilters, kniters, and crocheters. I'm not sure when, or if, this woman sleeps.

Profanity alert.... Look out below...

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All righty! And with that cathartic commitment out of the way, I turned my eyes to my very oldest UFO, the one that has sat at the top of my Works in Progress forever--Strips that Sizzle. I had been really intrigued by the color studies and possibilities in Margaret J. Miller's 1997 book Strips that Sizzle, and had begun my own quilt in late 2005.

Here it is underway in a photo taken at a retreat in 2006:

And actually, it was well-underway at that point. After much fumbling and musing, this was pretty much the final layout, minus a few blocks. Those blocks were made, the top was assembled, and then it languished, folded on a shelf, until YESTERDAY.

Yesterday it was layered and pinned,

and quilting began.

I'm feeling immensely good about this.