Life is Back To Normal

As I sit here typing this I can see out my front window at the snow/rain/ice storm that was promised.
I'm inside, I have on my new Christmas slippers from my son and warm tights from the $ store.
Dinner is leftovers. What could be easier?

I did manage to work on my quilt projects over the last week. I now only have 35 blocks left to complete the DJ quilt. (All wedge blocks and the 4 corner blocks).
I have started hand quilting my small piece. As daunting as the process seemed at the beginning, a friend reminded me that Sashiko quilting (which I HAVE done) is a version of standard? quilting. With that in mind it was less terrifying. I am TRYING to master thimble use but that's another story altogether.

I quickly abandoned stitching in the sashing and had much better success and speed with the tree motifs. Stitches were very irregular at first but they're coming together.

And to make my life even more hectic, on the 21st, (while I was Christmas shopping in the sacred halls of Costco), I received a call to see if I could rush quilt a Christmas gift. It was out the door at noon on the 23rd. (So quickly I didn't get a photo of it but here's the pattern from the internet.)

This was the "Oh Canada" quilt done in Northcott fabric.

In all it went pretty quick but it was still a solid 12 hours of quilting.
Now I was tired. I still had the house to clean and Christmas dinner the next day.
We had company for 3 days. 3 days of minimal quilting ( oh the withdrawal...wine helped )

When everyone left yesterday I went around in circles for several hours, ( I DID SIT long enough to hands sew a few DJ Blocks)
But TODAY I dove into the Guild Challenge ( 25 shades of grey).

This is where we left off. A moon of fractured and varied materials.

After stitching on the obvious contour lines, I lightly quilted the background with wind swirls.
Then I started adding....... what else .........TREES.

Various shades, some in front of the moon looking darker than those to the side.....at least that's the idea.
How big is this going to finish?......

Probably like this!
But it feels good to be started.
I have so much to finish here and pieces to replace at the gallery, I've been spinning.
So it nice to move forward on something today.