Finish #12

 It feels really good to be posting finishes instead of just piles of blocks!

This crazy quilt is now finish #12 for the year! It's approximately 60x70, so a good sized throw. 

I had just enough of this fabric in stash for the backing. There is the tiniest amount left, probably will get tossed in the string bin.

So far today I've finished quilting a quilt, and trimmed it for binding, plus I just finished assembling a quilt top for Mr. L. I need to press the top and get it layered so I can baste it tomorrow. I really hate assembling quilts in the summer. There's no way to do it without a lap full of quilt. It's been so hot our air conditioner can't keep up, so although it's way nicer inside than out, it's still hot to have a quilt on your lap.

I keep seeing chances for rain, but we haven't gotten any rain at our house since April. May and June are normally very dry, but July-September is usually rainy season, and it can start any time now! 

Most of next week I'm on full-time Nana duty, taking care of the grands while Mama and Daddy are out of town. I'm not expecting to get anything done while I have the grands, and I'll likely need a couple days to recover after they go home. Right now my goal is to get to a good starting place for when I get back to quilting. Basting Mr. L's quilt will have my FMQ hour per day ready to go. I'm hoping to finish sub-cutting some units for some quilts that are started, and I'd like to get the baby quilt for my great-nephew on the way cut out as well. If I can accomplish those before Tuesday when Nana duty starts,  I can jump right back into quilting at good starting places. 

To me it's never about a good stopping place, there are lots of those. The trick to being productive is to stop at a good place to start the next time you do that activity. It's a lot like trying to load the dishwasher and realizing you never unloaded it. That's not a good starting place, even though running the dishwasher is a stopping place. It's a happy day when you go to load the dishwasher and it's empty, that's a great starting place. I use the same ideas in quilting. Sure, I can baste a quilt as a starting place, but it's a better starting place if the quilt is already basted, since my normal sewing day starts with an hour of quilting. If I have to baste before that, I'll likely not quilt an hour that day. The same with having a quilt cut out. Cutting a quilt out is already a starting place, but if I'm going to have several days of not sewing, then having the quilt already cut out is a better place to get back into sewing. I can just sit down and sew instead of having to cut first. I'm always working on several projects at once, so there's always more to cut and more to assemble, and more to baste and more to quilt.  (I usually bind right after I finish quilting so that's not normally something I have a backlog of)

It took me so long to get back in the groove after being in Yuma for three months, that I'm trying to be careful to not mess up my mojo with the next interruption. We'll see how I do!