Sometimes there's just no explanation

I know.

You don't even have to say it.

I've been negligent.

I'm sorry.

I kinda lost my sew-jo/mo-jo this winter.  Maybe it was the cold.  Maybe this disgusting winter made me curl up on my couch under a blanket and will it and implore it to be July....or just 30 degrees.  Or just 20.  Hell, I think I would have settled for 12.  Maybe there seemed to be a lot more mentally exhausting things going on at work.  Maybe I was working on learning a new skill.  Maybe something sad and unexpected happened.  Heck, maybe it was all of it.  But somewhere, as a result, I wasn't sewing.  I wasn't even thinking about sewing.  I wasn't lusting after fabric in the same way I usually do.  In fact, I wasn't even reading the blogs I usually read.  Weird.

I'm pretty sure this was the last thing I was working on.  I think it might have been at the end  of January.  It's the chunk-of-the-month with the guild.  I think it's starting to look visually interesting.  Well...not visually interesting enough to blog about or anything....(should I stop being sarcastic with myself?) but, still.  I'm now officially two months behind on this.

I was playing with this on the floor of a mini-retreat hosted by our guild - it makes a good work space.

As my learn-something-new goal for 2014, I decided I wanted to learn how to knit.  So....a bunch of YouTube videos and a couple of trips to Michael's later, I was able to do this:

I have, at this point, made three of these dish cloths and a delightful, soft, cowl which I have no pictures of so I will show you later.

Since then, I have made a couple of trips to fun yarn stores (ya, whoever thought I would string the words fun, yarn, and store together?!?).   I have lovely sets of needles and am currently halfway through the gap-tastic cowl which was all the rage all over blog-land this winter.  Not gonna lie, this may serve to distract me from sewing.

At the beginning of February I was feeling pretty smug about having SCADS of time to make my BFF's brand new competition suit.  Then...well...you know...life happened and all of a sudden I had one week left to cut, sew, and bejewel the thing before my March 9th deadline.  Ugh.  Nothing like a little stress to get a person motivated.  Have I ever mentioned to you how I'm not a person who lives for the last minute?!?  Needless to say, I cut out all my pieces on Saturday, sewed the whole mama-jama on Sunday and placed about 700 individual crystals on it in about 10 hours.

Here she is modelling the thing as soon as I finished it at 1 a.m., the night before I was supposed to leave on vacation.  It turned out not too shabby if I do say so myself. 

Since the competition suit almost-fiasco of early March, I have started to crawl out of my little winter-induced hole.  I started reading my blogs again, I have been reconnecting with my fabric lust.  The last two weeks alone prove this to be true.  I have spent more money on fabric over the last two weeks than I have in the previous three months.  This is helping:

Only about the cutest thing ever, right?

This is my niece Maddie.  We were having a day-long, carpet play-date.  We coloured.  A lot.  Like, I think we may have killed the markers we coloured so much.  We also played dominoes, read a book, coloured some more, and played with stuffies.  Then, Maddie decided she wanted to peel all the labels off the crayons.  Although this upsets my need for ridonkulous amounts of order in the world, I dived in.  There were peels flying everywhere and naked crayons lying all over the floor.  I mean, look at that face.  How could a person look at that face and NOT pull the peels of the crayons.  *sigh*  I'm in trouble.

And, in a sure sign of spring and an end to my winter no-sew blahs, this arrived this week:

Delicious fat-quarter bundle of Lizzy House's Pearl Bracelets.  

Even better!!!!  Delicious fat-quarter bundle of NEW tone-on-tone Pearl Bracelets!  So pretty!

So the first bundle is hopefully going to one day find itself into a Bloom Bloom Pow quilt.  I have kinda wanted to make one of these since it was on the Freshly Pieced blog last summer (I think).  That second bundle?  Truth be told, I think I might be happy to let that live on the shelves for a good long while.  :)

Now, I gotta go dust off my sewing machine.  It's time to work my kinks out.