I may have to rethink that year-long trip across North America

We're doing a bit of a reno at our house which has required us to pack up a floor of stuff and move it out of the way.  As we are doing this, we had to determine what we will need access to for the next couple of months and what we can live without.  The number of things I need access to is quite startling.  Too much to fit into even a bus-sized motor home for the trip fantasy mentioned in the title.

I guess some of it comes from being a crafty person.  I need a good supply of knitting projects and several quilting ideas readily at hand.  I need certain dishes to cook with and can't possibly pack away too many clothes.  I always have the belief that if I can complete even half of the projects that I have stash matched against, I will become a minimalist.  Ha!

Just in time!

This quilt has been in progress since the summer.  So it really shouldn't be a just in time for Christmas thing.  Why the long time to completion?  It just wasn't a project that kept me motivated for some reason.  I absolutely love the colours and the finished product but had to force myself to keep going.  I think it has something to do with the amount of piecing involved to get to final construction.  The pattern, from Kaffe Fasset's Country Garden Quilts, I mostly followed.  And the stripy fabric on the right is his too.

This quilt is for my dad who asked me to make a bed-sized quilt for him.  I found fabric selection to be difficult for this.  There were surprisingly few fabrics on the conservative side that were geared to men.  My local quilt shop had a few but only two or three that appealed to me.  I found a few at Bee Modern Fabrics at Niagara-on-the-Lake, a few in my stash and a few from the previously mentioned LQS Quilter's Garden Patch.

I had some trouble getting the corners perfect but when I took it in to Quilter's Garden Patch to find the border fabric, the girl working there told me to not to spend anymore time trying to fix them.  It was good advice.  Firstly because I never would have finished if I had stopped to take out all of the corners. Secondly, all put together and quilted, these issues are a lot less noticeable.

In the end, I really like this and hope my dad does too.

Well that's cool

Another example of my not noticing the obvious ... I was bouncing around Ravelry and noticed their tutorials.  I clicked on the one related to library and discovered something I should have realized on my own.  I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I didn't realize it on my own but am so excited by this find, I just needed to talk about it somewhere.  My husband was mildly interested but obviously didn't understand the benefits of this time saving feature of the site.

Here goes ... I discovered that if I load all of my books and pamphlets into the library, I can search from the patterns I own online instead of flipping through the real books on the shelves.  I don't know why I didn't realize this before.  I knew you could look up books and see the patterns, just didn't think of the connection to the library.  How liberating.  In fact, I found a sock pattern for men in 5 seconds instead of giving up after an hour.  The only downside of this feature - I quickly realized that I have a boatload of books and in reducing stash need to use some of these fantastic patterns to justify the purchases.

I wonder what else I don't know about ...