I ended up reading on google for a while after my computer broke - eventually I stopped reading because being unable to block anything or mark anything as ignore and each title and summary taking up so much space it was taking longer to read and I was getting less pleasure from it, so I drifted away from doing it.
Thankfully I got a new laptop eventually and have been setting it up this week and I should be all set to go with newsgroups.
I've had a lot of fun quilting this summer. I'm almost finished with an eye spy quilt for a friend's little boy - when I say I spy, I mean lots of squares of novelty fabric, my kids collected some from two years of western washington shop hop and announced they wanted to make a quilt for this boy. Squares seem to get a lot smaller as you put them together and I was shooting for a twin size quilt so I had to add some from stash and I then got stuck on the idea of not going out and buying anything so there are some scraps in there that aren't really novelty, but the overall effect seems to have worked out ok. I used a 2 inch strip of blue to break it up and that surrounds an inner area, followed by a border that is 2 squares deep (the inside was 5 inch squares to start out, but the border was made up of squares that had started at 4in).
Given I'd decided not to buy anything I had to piece the backing, I had one big piece of fire engines, but the rest was mostly fat quarters that had had one strip cut off them!
I quilted it with a wavy stitch as it means you don't have to worry about corners and keeping it dead straight, it quilted up really quick, I reckon about 4 hours including marking (I did diagonal lines), rolling and pinning - maybe it was even less than that, it was 24 hours from the first quilting stitch to the last and I did a lot of other things in that 24 hours!
I have to finish attaching the binding then sew it down, which I'm thinking of doing my machine! I'm also planning to cut 6 inch letters for the child's name out of fusible then applique them with a zig zag through all the quilt layers, it will be tricky to manipulate the whole quilt, but he only has a 4 letter name, so I think it will be worth it!
What's everyone else doing?
Anne