Chatterbox Quilts Chitchat: Back to Earth!

Hi everyone:

Wow! It's been almost a month since my last blog post and it's definitely time to get my head back to quilting.

As some of you know, I was away for the kids' spring break. This year we decided to try out cruising and spent a week on the Carnival Liberty, stopping at Cozumel, Belize, Roatan (Honduras) and Grand Cayman. Fortunately for us, we had amazing weather and smooth seas.

Carnival Liberty - our home on the water for a week

A view of the pool area on the Lido deck

As we were first-time cruisers, we weren't sure what to expect, but I certainly didn't expect to be pampered as much as we were. I was a bit nervous about the cabin size, but found that our unit was very spacious and well appointed. I wish my house - and my quilt studio - were this well-organized and efficient!

Relaxing in our room the first day.

There was ample room for our clothes and toiletry items in the bathroom as well as soft, luxurious bathrobes to wear. We had two rooms - one for my husband and I and one for our two kids. This turned out to be perfect! We had connecting balconies and were able to go back and forth between the rooms via the balcony. It provided us with a great view of the ports of call and allowed us to see the late stragglers coming back on-board!

Our secret entry into the kids' room!

The only disappointment of the trip was that I didn't find any quilt shops at our stops. I'm sure my husband viewed this as a blessing as it helped to keep our expenditures down, but I was hoping to bring back at least a little bit of cotton. Oh well, I did find jewellery and other items to console myself :)

Ready for our first elegant night in the dining room.

I love embarrassing my teenagers!

Now that I'm back I am working on some more new patterns. I've just published my first AccuQuilt GO! and GO! Baby friendly table runner pattern called "Tweet-Heart". I had a lot of fun working on this one and it came together very quickly. As a matter of fact, I have several samples of this pattern as I couldn't stop at just one! I have to thank Ann Marie for helping me test this one out. I certainly appreciated her comments and quick reply to my request for testing out this pattern.

I've, I mean, my husband, has been putting the finishing touches on my next video series and I will be releasing the first part of it soon. We had a few more technical issues with the last video in this series, so it took a bit longer to complete, but it's now ready to go.

Before I get back to finishing more patterns and working on the video release, I'll leave you with a few final images of our Caribbean vacation.