Now what would you think if you got a text message from your daughter that read 'I am not in any danger'? Yes, I rather panicked about the danger she WASN'T in. Her little town is in the grip of a huge flood, rather ironic when it has been drought-stricken for many years. But she is safe and dry, and cut off from her place of work, so she has been having a holiday this week. I bet she wishes she was a quilter and could sew all week.

Things have been a bit busy around here for the last few days, as I start design work for the year. I know I will enjoy it once I get started, but getting started is always a bit of a problem. I'm in sewing and quilting mode, and I don't really want to be spending hours at the computer. However, having done this for 14 years now, I know that once I see the designs taking shape I will get obsessed with the possibilities, and then I won't want to be anywhere else, or do anything else. It's like living in another world for a little while; exciting and satisfying and so much fun, but ultimately exhausting and isolating too. It's always nice to come back to the real world for a rest.

Having the Statler to play on this year will be fun, and should help with the design process. My first task was to work on a customer quilt with huge blank corner triangles, too large to quilt in one pass. It was interesting coming up with a design that could be partially stitched, and then completed after the quilt was rolled on; a bit of a challenge, but we worked it out in the end. And solving that problem led to many more ideas, so I will get busy and draft them tomorrow.

After my efforts to finish the Carolina Coverlet (I stayed up ALL night) I haven't felt like starting another project, especially when I know I won't be able to spend a lot of time on it during the next few weeks. I bound two quilts, and that was very satisfying; I also managed to lose the binding of a third quilt, and it hasn't come to light after three days. I just know it will turn up in a kitchen cupboard or somewhere, and I won't have a clue how it got there. I can wait....

Pam commented on the blue anvil blocks in the last post. I plan to make a quilt to match this one, which is a large twin size. This 4patch drank up most of my small blue scraps, for which I'm grateful. The Anvil blocks are using up the rest of them, though I think they will be set like this instead of all the same direction. I like to make quilts in pairs, so that there can be one on two beds in a room, or one folded at the foot of the bed while the other covers it. My DS had bunk beds, and I liked to have similar quilts on them; not the same, because that would be boring, but similar colours and fabrics. These quilts will go in my blue bedroom nicely.

Mereth very kindly sorted out my 2" strips, and even made some 4-patches. I want to make hundreds of them and then decide what to do with them. They will be nice pick-up-and-put-down sewing while I work on designs for the next few weeks. And I dare Mereth to tell you how many 9-patches she found in a drawer last week......