Winter Schminter - Blog Hop and Summery giveaway

Quilting Gallery claims it is winter. Here in New England we call March "mud season", that special time of year when the nights are cold and the days are warmer, which leads to sap buckets
lining the trees of Main Street,

Or plastic bags. Whatevs.

deer in the backyard eating our old Halloween pumpkins,

The smart ones know they are safer from me in the back yard than on Main Street.

  and the frost coming out of the ground to leave big old globs of mud pretty much everywhere.

Isn't nature fun?

It is at this time of year that I am particularly thankful to my husband for being alive, as the children have made me promise that if he dies we can replace him with a dog. I for one am praying neither of these events ever happens, because I recall all too well my mother mopping up muddy paw prints for the months of March, April, and part of May. Plus he lifts heavy things, and knows with one look at me whether it is a little wine glass evening or a big wine glass evening; I'm not at all sure I'm up to teaching a dog how to use a wine opener.

So, if you are new here, yes, I do enjoy sarcasm and irreverence and self-depreciating humor with the best of them, and I hope you do too! I started this blog as a companion to my website a few years ago to give me a space to vent, hold court, tell stories, etc in a place where I didn't have to be completely professional, and somehow it has taken over as the place people go to rather than my website. I'm glad, because this is where you get the real me, whackadoodleness and all.
 
January and February saw the start of my latest group quilt project "Taking Names" and the second annual "Drop and Give Me Twenty" event. Both were great fun and excellent opportunities for all of you bloglanders join in some of my daily fun, and if you didn't participate I hope you'll check out some of the fun we had. Here are a couple of my DaGMT finishes:

For the next few months, the the only thing I can promise about visiting QHH will be you will have a front row seat to watch me spin myself up into a state of panic and mayhem as I prepare to be a first time exhibitor at Spring Quilt Market in Portland.

Much like one coming down with the flu, I alternate between hot flashes of inspiration and confident thoughts of "I got this, baby," and cold sweats of sheer horror when I think about all I need to accomplish in the next less than ten weeks. I've secured some slave labor in the form of Kelli Fannin, whom I met on line and have yet to see in person. I'm that trusting. Many of you may know her too from her fantastic blog "Seriously......I Think iT Needs Stitches." We've bonded via blogging, email, and FB, so of course it only follows that she would agree to help out in Portland, run with some amazing ideas about the booth, and agree to share a hotel suite with me even though I may turn out to be a psycho. Both of us will be blogging from the show, so be sure to check it all out.

To celebrate these last few days of winter and of me having a shred of sanity left before the true Market prep crazies hit, I am giving away a yard of a summery batik and a pattern for a tote by Studio Aika, along with handles. The fabric should be enough for the cover and lining of the bag.

All this can be yours!

To enter to win, you must do two things:

1. Become a follower of my blog. So easy! Just click on "join this site" over there on the right sidebar above all the gorgeous faces of current followers and you are done. If you are already a follower, you obviously don't have to do this. Just mention that you are already in your comment so that I can feel all excited that you found me somehow in the past.

2. Our local library is doing a promo for "Love Your Library"week next month asking "What do you Geek?" Apparently "geeking" is now a term for being interested in something and going about learning about it/participating in it for fun. We all geek quilting, obviously. I want to know what ELSE you geek, be it cooking, solving molecular equations, travel, architecture, Downton Abbey, whatever. So in the comments, tell me what you geek. I want to make sure all of my readers are well rounded and geeky quilters.

As for what I geek, it's definitely history. Huge history geek. Send me to a museum, let me read a fantastically written and researched historical novel, show me a Civil War soldier's uniform in a case at a local library, you name it, I'm on it. I've even gotten two of three of my children to prefer a historical house tour over a day at the water park and the six year old can tell you more about Abe Lincoln than I can. Bizarrely, though, I really dislike reproduction fabrics and extremely traditional patterns in quilts and am not all that excited by antique quilts.

So follow and geek it up, hotties! Thanks for participating and enjoy the blog hop!