After my marathon of sewing and quilting over the weekend, I have not turned on any sewing machine since.  In fact, I’ve only walked through my studio, and not actually done anything in there.

Instead, I’ve chained myself to my desk.  My primary work in progress right at the moment is the self-published book I am working on.  I want to be able debut it at Machine Quilters Exposition in New Hampshire in April, and working back from there with a timeline means I have a lot to do in the next 3 weeks.

When I did the first book, I made the decision to do all of my drawing on the computer.  This is not necessarily as easy as it sounds, and in fact might even be more work than if I were to just do hand-drawn illustrations.  I chose to go with using the computer, though, for several reasons, not the least of which is that I’m a technology geek….more important is that I wanted the drawings to be very clean and crisp.  I also wanted the flexibility of computer generated vector drawings, which allow me to move and resize my drawings very easily as I work on laying out pages and deciding what needs to go where.

Just to give you an idea of the difference in quality, here are 2 feather drawings, 1 drawn by hand and scanned, the other done in

using a tablet and pen:

Big difference!

For today, my works in progress include:

The book….the photo is purposely a little fuzzy, but I wanted to have some way to photographically show what I’m working on..

Some potential quilted samples.  I thought about firing up the quilting machine again for awhile….these are all borrowed from my local quilt shop owner’s large stash of unquilted tops.  Most of her tops are large, but I found a few lap-sized possibilities when I visited her on Monday.  I’m sad to report that she is in the process of closing her brick and mortar store.  She has plans to continue online sales, and will be doing some online teaching later this year.  Her store had been open for 18 years!  You can visit her at Iowa Star Quilts.

I have 2 other quilting projects that I’m contemplating working on today as well.  One is a Longarm Round Robin, which I can’t share photos of, as we are keeping the quilted work secret until the final reveal…the other is a project for a magazine.  I can’t share more about that either, yet….

Not to mention the fact that it is almost time for the March 12×12 journal quilt reveal and that project hasn’t even been started.

Unfortunately, I’m likely to end up sitting here at the computer all day and not make it into the studio again, so blogging about the quilting may be as far as any of it gets today!