Is That Daylight I See?

I've finally come up for air after struggling to finish a gorgeous quilt for a first-time customer.

It's 118" x 118". That's 13,924 sq.in. And I quilted every last inch of it. I usually keep track of the hours put into each quilt, but I stopped counting at 30. And that was back in September I think. I don't know when exactly, cuz I stopped keeping track of the months sometime last summer. (Do you like the blurry picture? Me too.)

It's a Bali Star Double Wedding Ring by designer Judy Niemeyer, and if you've ever pieced one of these, you know how many pieces there are and how long it takes. Personally, I'm not that dedicated, and the payoff isn't great enough for me to invest the time and energy into sewing-ripping-sewing-ripping-sewing...and finally throwing the whole damn thing out. I have several friends (Ho's and otherwise) that are s-l-o-w-l-y working their way through this pattern and every time I see them reading through their pattern BOOK, I'm thankful that I can appreciate the lowly 9-patch:

And I want you to notice: it's hand-quilted! So what if it's only 12" square? It's hand-quilted, dammit!! Now that I'm looking at it, I see it could probably use a little more quilting. Maybe I'll do that. Or not.

Hey! Guess what I found on the interweb! A Hen Cam! I've been missing the fresh eggs we used to get for many years from our chickens until we finally surrendered to the local raccoons. A few years back they ate 45 chickens over the period of about 4 months. Nothing we did could keep them out of the henhouse, including trying to enlist the help of these two.

Once, while Andy was getting ready to um...dispatch... a chicken, he looked over to see a coon staring him down for dinner! Then Hurricane Ike took out the henhouse itself and that was the end of that.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Since I finished that quilt, I decided to take a couple of days off, put my feet up, and just meander through the internet for pictures to add to my boards at Pinterest That's when I came across THE HEN CAM!

From dawn to dusk, I can watch somebody else's chickens any time I want. And a rabbit. And two goats! We used to have all of those. Now I'm depressed. The rabbits were yummy, but the goat died of old age. Anyway, now I'm working on plans for the new henhouse out behind my studio. So I can watch my own chickens live and not have to rely on some random farmer's Hen Cam. Maybe I'll install my own. But then I'd have to do hair and makeup every time I went out to collect eggs. Ok. No Hen Cam. But wait - if I did have one, I'd call it my "Chick Cam: Chick's 24/7...Chicks All Day, Errday!" Imagine the number of hits it'd get! And how unhappy most of them would be when they found out they were looking at birds, hay and chicken poop. That'd be worth it.