greetings from construction central...

...not exactly what we thought we were doing this weekend, but it's all good. More about that in a bit.

Pacific International Quilt Festival report: As expected there were many beautiful quilts, some spectacular quilts, and a few that were off the mark. While I appreciate all of the effort that it takes to produce a traditional quilt, I am more inspired by innovative or art quilts.

I particularly love some of the quilts that come from Japan. Here's a detail view of "The Flower of the Wind" by Mariko Miwa. The use of metallic threads was stunning.

The "Fossily" quilt by Karen Roberts of Germany was also amazing.

Here's a detail of the beading in that quilt:

While not a quilt, "Even Frogs Dream" by Thom Atkins was a wonderful beaded work:

I did a little shopping in the marketplace, but didn't buy much. One thing I did get was a "Sugar Skull" quilt kit from 1/4 Inch Publishing. I love Day of the Dead stuff and I couldn't pass this up.

I worked a little on my Rusty Dahlia socks, but ran into a problem that I need to frog. I did a couple of hours worth of quilting on the Paint It Red quilt. I worked on the cross stitch mermaid—finished one of the ribbon (sash?) areas and started working on her arm.

That was the planned part of the weekend. The unplanned part was that we bought some new appliances for the kitchen! We needed a new dishwasher and we've wanted to replace the 39-year-old exhaust fan with a microwave-fan combo, so we took care of that.

We've had a lot of issues with our oven, like wild temperature fluctuations, cookies that were burned on the bottom and raw on the top, things taking forever to cook, etc. I couldn't see going into the holiday season with an oven that didn't work right, so we decided to replace our cook top and oven with a new range (convection oven, quick-to-boil burner...)

The construction part? Well, our old oven was a drop-in and fit in a 24-inch opening; the range is freestanding and is  30-inches wide (as are most ranges). The Husband has had to remove portions of the counter and cabinets to gain 6 mores inches for the range to fit. It means I lose some cabinet and drawer space, but I'm gaining so much more! There is now a film of sawdust over pretty much everything in the kitchen and living room, but he's got the majority of the demo done.

We won't get the new range until at least Friday, so we're depending on the microwave and toaster oven for cooking. It's only for a short time and it's so worth it!!