What's been going on

I hate it when I go quiet. I'm assuming you're not fond of it either, dear readers - you keep showing up here, and it would be nice if I gave you something to read.

Things are happening behind the scenes, of course. We're down to just final copy edits for A Wider World. The cover has been finished, and I've scored an absolutely mind-blowing quote for the cover from a Tudor author whose work I really respect. Coming soon, I promise.

I've also completed and submitted Lady, in Waiting before my New Year's Eve deadline, and now I'm doing rewrites before re-submitting. (That first submission was so the publisher could see that I actually had something that could be reasonably wrangled into book shape; now comes the actual wrangling). It's going pretty well, though, and I hope to have this draft done by end of February.

What I'm also doing is recovering from a really good online Christmas this year. While sales were down in my vintage Etsy shop, they were booming over on the handmade side. Being prevented from doing holiday shopping sent people online. Go figure! Even with postal delays, almost everything arrived on time.

I had to end Christmas stocking orders early. I sent a batch to a shop I work with in Philadelphia, and would have sent more, but ran out of the vintage quilts I like to use. It's getting harder to find ones that are in good enough condition to use, but with enough damage that I don't feel guilty cutting them up. Luckily, I scored two on Ebay just after the holidays, and a hunter-gathering neighbor found a third for me.

My favorite order of the season was from a customer who sent me a box of quilted placemats made by her recently deceased mother-in-law. She wanted them turned into stockings for the family, and have a holiday table runner made with the leftover. I'm working on the table runner, because we realized it wouldn't happen by Christmas - especially with the postal difficulties - but I think her stockings came out well. I'm not a fan of precise patchwork (not making it, anyway) but the placemat fabrics really lent themselves to my more random design ideas.

Now I must go back to my other writing. Just wanted to pop in, look around, make sure people were still here. Back soon.