Busy and Tired

I have neglected my blog for over a week. We have been painting and I am plum tuckered out. The last thing to paint is the ceiling in the family room. It has a coffered or tray ceiling and working overhead on a ladder is not an easy thing. My neck and shoulders are screaming and I feel as though I have done ten gym workouts with all the up and down from the ladder.

Circle in the Square Quilt Guild held their March meeting last Tuesday. The speaker was Nancy Eisenhauer who belongs coincidentally to another guild of which I am a member in Illinois. Nancy likes to participate in challenges and has entered and won quite a few. Most notably, she has been published twice in the AQS publications Orange Peel: New Quilts from an Old Favorite and Sawtooth:New Quilts from an Old Favorite. She brought both of her entries to show us as well as slides of her most recent entry in the Carolina Lily: New Quilts from an Old Favorite challenge. If you get to Paducah this year, look for her quilt which will be hanging in the Quilt Museum. Her entry is, of course, already at Paducah, but she had slides to show us and it is another stunner.

As a relatively new quilter, I had bought one of the books in the series and was sorely disappointed upon reading it as it contained not one pattern for a quilt. Fast forward a decade when I came upon the book in my quilt library and pulled it out to take another look. These books are now my favorites and I have most of them. They are wonderful to read with my more experienced quilter's eyes. Each finalist in the challenge is portrayed with a bio, the source of their inspiration for their entry, and information about the construction of the quilt. I love reading "the rest of the story" (with apologies to Paul Harvey).  Here is one of the quilts that Nancy brought for us to see. It's not part of a contest or challenge, but was one of my favorites:

I have made some progress on the TQS BOM. I got slowed down when I realized that I had not made all the green and violet sashing pieces that I needed. With great gusto I tore into getting them done and then sliced off a portion of one of them when trimming up the paper-pieced sections. That was a bit disheartening after all the work and I haven't had a spare moment since then to get back to the project. Soon, though.

Evenings when I am not too tired from painting, I have worked on my hexie project. Here's the current state of affairs: