post-weekend update

Hi and welcome to so many new visitors and followers from the Quilting Gallery Blog Hop Party!  If you're looking for the giveaway post, please click here or scroll down to see the jelly roll and pattern I'm giving away and enter to win.

My Honey and I had a wonderful weekend away together.  We went to a lovely B&B in Goshen, Virginia called the Hummingbird Inn, saw a hilarious one-man Christmas show at the American Shakespeare Center, and had delicious dinners at Brix Wine Bar in Lexington and Zynodoa in Staunton.  We also enjoyed a wine tasting at Rockbridge Vineyards and did lots of holiday shopping, but for me the best part was finding a new quilt shop - the Quiltery in Fairfield, Virginia.  They don't have a website but it was SUCH a lovely find.

One purchase at the Quiltery was a Honey Bun of Moda's "Neptune" by Tula Pink.  I'd never seen the line before, and that's probably because it was released in early 2009, when I was moving from Baltimore to Roanoke and had a million other things on my mind besides being up to speed on new fabric releases.  But I just LOVED the colors and could not resist buying it:

I am toying with the idea of a log cabin quilt with the coral shades in the centers.  Or maybe a Bento Box-style quilt. 

And then, I learned that the Quiltery carries the entire Marcus Fabrics Civil War Chronicles line that my BOM is from!  Oh, I wish I had known that earlier when I had the little cutting accident, ran low and had to use a different fabric! But I did buy the 108" wide backing fabric from them on Saturday.

Speaking of the BOM project, here is what I have put together/laid out so far.  Yes, I worked on it a little bit when I got home last night:

It's getting so big that it's becoming hard to photograph.  Not only that, but my sewing room is shrinking!  Well, not really, but it feels that way.  In the top right of the photo you can see a few of my mother's sewing machines that I blogged about here.  I finally heard back from the local sewing guild and they will help me in finding new homes for all of my mom's stuff, but in the meantime, it's taking up space, and there will be more (patterns, books, notions) coming home with me from my dad's house this coming weekend.  In addition, this is generally where I hide and wrap Christmas presents, so they are also stacking up at the edges of the room.  But when I get downstairs, I'm in the mood to sew, not wrap!  Still, I need to do something before the weekend, since my Honey's daughters will be coming this weekend and I am headed north to spend it with my son, so I will need to clean up and stash presents so they're not found - intentionally or accidentally.

What do YOU do to help stay organized during the Christmas season?