EPP on the road

I should preface everything by saying I am now in the midst of the craziest month in recent memory!  It is exciting to be so close to major deadlines (my collaborator and I have an ISBN! we are negotiating cover art!  but we also have 30+ text intros to write...gulp), but also dizzying.  In a typical teaching semester I work really hard, but this is truly exceptional.  It's a little nuts, completely unsustainable, but it is also not going to last forever.

Anyway, my husband, littlest one and I are headed to a conference tomorrow, traveling by car.  My amazing husband gave me the gift of hours of quiet time yesterday, and I managed to finish my paper, which I'm presenting on Thursday but needs to go to the panel discussant this evening. Phew. 

Today we are celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving, and now we actually have a little bit of leisure time to prepare for our trip tomorrow.

When it became clear that I really was near the end of my paper, my mind turned to -- what else -- a little sewing project I could take with me.  Right now, a day in the car sounds like fun: no e-mail, no pressure to write or research or prep or grade.  I'm going to SEW!

I already have two English paper piecing projects underway.  One is a grandmother's flower garden started many months ago:

The other is my Loulouthi hexie project, which is inching towards completion.

Neither of these projects is highly portable at the moment...BUT I have been inspired by the 60 degree diamond quilts that have been all over the blogosphere and flickr...there's even a quiltalong group.  You can see some gorgeous shots of their works-in-progress here.  The ones that really caught my eye feature scrappy tumbling blocks (sets of three diamonds) set between white stars (sets of six diamonds).

Yesterday I raided my overflowing scrap bag and started churning out 2" 60-degree diamonds.  Luckily I have a big bag of the paper templates from paperpieces.com.

But I was having copy-cat anxiety.  I couldn't bring myself to replicate that project so exactly, as gorgeous as it is.  I needed a twist.

White or off-white was guaranteed to work for the stars that dominate my inspiration project, and gray is always a possibility...but I think I have reached a gray-saturation-point. So for my solid I decided to audition a gorgeous Kona "amethyst" (I'm 95% certain that's the shade.  I really need a Kona colour card!). Why not try something a little more daring, right?

I'm happy to say that I love the effect of the amethyst.  Some of the Kona shades are kind of magical: there is something about the level of colour saturation that is so beautiful I can almost taste it.  Does that make sense?  Colour delight that is palpable...it is a wonderful thing.

There are a lot of loose ends and last-minute details to work out before we leave tomorrow -- we can't travel by tricycle in our pj's, although Frida is game to try.  But I'm happy that I do have a fun new project to carry along.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of my Canadian friends, and 

I hope you have a great week wherever you are!