Happy Friday, y’all.

What a long week this has been. A really L-O-N-G week. Anyone else out there feel this way?

Well, I’ve got a couple of confessions to share. Nothing too serious, and one of them is even rather humorous. Read on, dear friends…..

Confession #1

Let’s start with these glorious strips of luscious ombre fabric from SewBatik.

Everything went quite well as I assembled the top half with the warm color spectrum strips to create a brand new quilt design for my next book.

But then I began working with the cool color spectrum strips. The first mistake I made was to cut the strips around 11pm at night. Big mistake. HUGE. Let me just recommend from personal experience that no matter how “alert” you may feel at 11pm, you should never, ever, EVER, cut fabric for a quilt at night! Ask me how I know. Well I’ll tell you, when I began constructing the cool color spectrum strips into a strata the next morning, I realized my mistake. Make that plural: MistakeS. So I used my remaining smidgen of each fabric and cut more strips. This time, correctly. Or, what I thought was correct.

Confession #2

It was Tuesday. I was hurrying because I wanted to finish the top to take to my quilt group, the Woolies, that evening for show and tell. So I rushed to hurry and finish by the time I had to leave the house by 5pm. When I finished, I asked the boys to hold up the quilt top so I could see what it looked like:

Not bad, but something wasn’t right. The bottom half just didn’t flow somehow. Certainly not how I had planned it to look. That’s when I realized there were more mistakes in the second round of cutting as I had cut some of the graduated strips from light to dark, instead of from dark to light. And yes, it made a difference! That night, I went to bed feeling frustrated and annoyed at myself. Annoyed because I know better than to make so many silly, preventable errors.

My friend, Birgit, came up with a great name for this quilt. She called it, ”Sunset Over Troubled Waters.” I like the name. The quilt? Not so much. I just couldn’t live with it like this. Not when I knew I could do better.

So, I buckled down and got busy. Rather than try to rip it all apart and start over again, I went back to that first pile of mis-cut strips. I dug tiny pieces out of my trash can. And then I went through the arduous process of matching each one of those bits and pieces with the mis-cut strips. And I put them back together again — all 40 of them – like a puzzle. I stitched all those mis-cut pieces back together into 40 new strips and cut them yet again. This time I took great care to make sure each and every cut was correct.

And the result? I LOVE IT!

Now it is finally ready to be sent to Birgit for quilting. And when she gets through with it, it will be BRILLIANT.

Confession #3

This confession has to do with Facebook. And I’m almost embarrassed to share it with you all as it is so silly — so unlike me — because I consider myself to be quite “tech savvy.” But it’s also quite funny too, and I thought you could use a good chuckle for today.

For the past six months or so, I have been posting all sorts of things on Facebook. Photos, status updates, pictures of my quilts, my boys, and our pets. And in all that time, no one left a comment. Not even a “like.” Nope. Not one person. Not one comment. Not one “like.”

I admit, even thought I try really hard not to wear my feelings on my sleeve, I was feeling kind of sorry for myself. I would see other people’s FB postings…… quilts…..photos…….status updates, etc. I would leave many comments or “likes” on other people’s timelines or posts. After about four months of this, I was really getting all worked up about it. I could see my own posts — all of them! They were on my personal page and on my timeline. Hmmmm……. I just couldn’t figure out why I was getting the cold shoulder treatment from, well, everyone.

Finally, last week, I made kind of an offhand remark to my 18 year old son about the fact that even HE never “liked” any of my posts and that I felt kinda dejected. And he said, “well, Mom, you never post anything.” Huh? No way! So I posted a photo of him and the cat and asked him to “like” it on FB. He sent me a text saying that he couldn’t see it. Hmmmmmm again. So I got smart and spent some time poking around in my Facebook settings. It took me all of 30 seconds to figure out the problem. For some inexplicable reason, I had somehow managed to set my privacy settings so the only person who could see my postings was……..are you ready? ME! Oh brother……

Yep — that’s my son laughing at me when he found out what I had done with my FB privacy settings! DAH!!!!

All those weeks (and months) of wondering why I was getting the cold shoulder treatment? My own doing — by accident of course. So once it was fixed and I posted something on FB, to my utter delight I received some “likes” AND some comments from friends. Oh, happy day!

So, I’ll “see” you on Facebook. And this time, you’ll be able to see ME.

(Sheesh.) Yep — it’s been a LONG week I tell ‘ya.