Fantabulous Friday: A Pumpkin and a Project

Ooh, boy, this has been the week of discombobulation.  I blame it on last weekend's trip and the fact that Steve has been home for (get this) SEVEN days.  A little distracted?  Yep, that's me.  All routine seems to have taken a gigantic hike.

Also, I think that the past four months of little or greatly interrupted sleep has caught up with me: I can't seem to drag myself out of bed before 9am.  The laziness of me!  It doesn't help that the darling HarriEd is on some sort of Got-to-Consume-Food-Every-Hour-Or-I-Will-Die kick, especially during the night.  We had a little discussion, she and I, about how she can be perfectly happy for four hour stretches during the day without needing to eat.  There's just something about having Mommy right at her beck and call all night which evokes sensations of extreme starvation.  I'm calling this a growth spurt in hopes that it will go away in a few days.  I'm too tired to try to figure out how to make her sleep more.

(But that sounds like a vicious cycle ready and waiting to happen.)

Anyways, I made a stuffed pumpkin last night for dinner:

It was very yummy indeed - just the right amount of warm, squishy, autumnal comfort food to make us all happy campers.  You can find the super-easy recipe here at Taste of Home.

Some of you beloved readers have inquired as to the Free Motion Personas art quilting class which I am taking (as evidenced by the button on the side of my blog).  I didn't know anything about art quilting, nor did I have a particular bent to learn until my mom plopped the kit for this online class that she received accidentally instead of the kit for her class.  My brother bought the class for me as my Christmas present, and so I'm learning something new!  Art quilting, from what I can tell, seems to be a combination of paper, fabric and fibers, all held together with free motion stitching.  It is so. much. fun, and I have barely begun the process.  Our first assignment was to make our background paper fabric.  Here is my first attempt (probably of many because the process was so amazingly liberating):

I dyed a square of muslin with coffee and then layered different pieces of vintage papers, magazine clippings, scrapbook paper, etc, onto the fabric and saturated the whole thing with watered-down glue.  The blue paper is actually tissue paper which "bleeds" the color when it gets wet.  The envelope up in the left corner was stuck in an old book of mine and contains a grocery list from 1927.  It's just really cool.

This project is fun for me because there are no rules: I have so much freedom to work with my creativity.  It's not about following a pattern just right, or about being judged on some idea, or even trying to create something that someone somewhere will want to spend lots of money on.  Anything goes with art quilting...and it combines my love of paper and fabric so perfectly.  

A new addiction?  I think so.  Sorry, Steve.