Time to kick-start the blog again!

Like I really need another committment, I just insanely signed up for the Pinwheel Sampler Quilt-Along at Rachel Griffith's blog p.s. i quilt. I discovered Rachel's blog (along with many other fantastic quilting blogs!) via one of her tutorials at the Mode Bakeshop, and I'm hooked. Rachel writes excellent tutorials, and designs fun, bright quilts. So when she announced the quilt-along last week, I was immediately tempted to join in - I love pinwheels, and this would be a great quilt to use up some of my 100+ batik fat quarters. I don't have time, I have a million UFOs already (okay, maybe not a million, but definitely double figures) and wasn't going to start anything new this year except stuff for the shop, but... this quilt just looks like so much fun, and I love the idea of a quilt-along. And really... how much time can it take to sew one block a week? :-)

And deciding to join in the quilt-along made me also decide that it is long past time to dust off the blog again, and try and get into a more regular blogging habit.

Soooooooooooo...

What's been going on in my quilting-and-otherwise life since I last posted? A Lot. An Awful Lot.

Not long after my last post, in October 2007, I decided to quit the office job, and give up working entirely for a while (big thank you here to my Lovely Hubby for making this possible for me). The company I worked for got assimilated by its biggest competitor, and I concluded, once again, that I do not like working for big companies. And that really, being a secretary was not what I saw myself doing for the rest of my working life. It was something I kind of drifted into when I moved to Germany, and had stuck with for lack of any other opportunity. So I gave notice, and at the end of December 2007 I hung up my secretarial/office manager hat for good. I spent 3 months being a good little German housewife, reading, sleeping, and just generally enjoying life again.

Then in March 2008, Kio arrived and turned our life upside-down. I'd always wanted a dog, but just didn't think it was fair to the dog to have one while I was working full-time. I won't go into the long story of how we came to the decision to get an Australian Shepherd, or found his breeder. Kio was such a wonderful dog, and it broke our hearts when he died aged just 13 months after a tragic accident in March 2009. We still both have a big Kio-shaped scar on our hearts, but the hole he left has been filled by his cousin, Frostie.

Anyway... while I was claiming unemployment benefit and trying to avoid having to take another office job, my quilting friend Birgit opened a quilt store. She started the business as a purely internet based shop around the end of 2005, and decided in early 2008 that it was time to move the business into a real bricks-and-mortar store. Since I had nothing better to do ;-) I spent a lot of time helping her to redecorate the premises she'd rented, and getting the store set up and open. After that I helped out when she needed me, and in October she asked me if I would be interested in joining her as a partner in the business. Guess what my answer was? ;-)

So here I am, co-owner of a small but expanding quilt store and I love it :-). It's a lot of work, but I love working with the fabrics, the customer contact, and working with Birgit. We think alike about most things, and complement each other in so many ways, and it's working out perfectly so far. We moved into new, larger premises last year in March, and acquired a second-hand longarm quilt machine from Gammill. She's my baby, and named Jenny, after my Mum, whose fault it is I've turned into a quilter. This is me and her, at our Open Day in July:



and Birgit, me and Frostie (the best thing about being my own boss is I can take my dog to work with me!!)



At about the same time as I started working with Birgit, I got offered a contract as freelance proofreader for a series of patchwork magazines published by a German publisher (thank you, Annie!). That involves about two weeks of part-time work every six weeks or so, all done here at home, proofreading the magazine and the instructions for all the quilts, etc. It's intensive but interesting work, and it pays for the dog food :-) The shop pays its own way pretty much so far, but at the moment all available income is being reinvested in stock, so we're not either of us actually pulling any kind of salary from it. But we are confident that we'll be able to in the not-too-incredibly-dim-and-distant future!

So there you go, somehow or other I've turned into something vaguely like a professional quilter - not something I imagined when I handed in my notice just over two years ago, or when I started the patchwork classes just over five years ago!