YES!! (fist pump, fist pump)

It's only 2:00 p.m. and already I have declared my studio FINISHED and I have FINISHED a small quilt I started in (gulp) 1999 and I have STARTED a little sketchbook collage. Holy cow!

There's still some fine-tuning to do in the studio. I need to put the rest of my Barbies on the doll shelves. What do I do with old (expensive) cameras and Kodachrome slides and and my slide projector? I have to get some Command strip hooks to hang wall dolls I've made. Eventually I will probably sell my spinning wheel. Maybe not. I've not come to a final decision about that. But next week I can launch into setting up my looms. And I'm otherwise good to go on everything else. Done! Finished! Life is good!

To celebrate, I FINISHED a small wall quilt I started a light year or so ago. It is "cute" and there is no way I would do "cute" at this point in my life. I hardly did "cute" even then. The story is that I made one for my quilt guild's annual small quilt auction. I thought it would be a very fast project (it wasn't), so I started 2 of them: one for the auction and one for some other unspecified purpose. The auction quilt has long since gone on to some other home. Today I finally finished the other one. For the time being, it hangs in our sitting room (or TV room or whatever you want to call it) between my studio and Randy's office. Considering the length of its journey, time wise, I'm not going to part with it real soon. (Yes, I hung it immediately. That was part of getting it finished. I LOVE those 3M Command strip hooks. For this purpose I use their photo clips.)

As for the collage... My sketchbook is full of lots of stuff, but not very many sketches. Mostly it's collages of various kinds. Often involving color schemes. Sometimes just ideas and compositions. This is the first one heading in a new direction: practicing using materials and methods that are new to me. They aren't meant to be anything more than exercises just to see "what happens if." It's nice to be back in that place again, doing "what happens if" things.

Life is good. Which probably means I'll be killed in a car accident this afternoon. Every time life is good, I wait for the other shoe to drop. Life is so good right now that I expect all of Zappos to fall from the sky on my head momentarily. Oh well. I'm just going to enjoy it at as long as it lasts.