Log Cabin Quilt from Upcycled Denim.... And It's King-Sized!

I originally posted this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World back in 2023.

What better summer project could there be than sewing a king-sized upcycled denim log cabin quilt?

I roasted while I sewed all that denim and flannel in the smack middle of the summer, but I’ll be so comfy this winter!

I’ve had this log cabin quilt sewn from upcycled denim in my mind’s eye for a few years, but it’s the embarrassing state of my fabric stash that finally prodded me into action. I may not have projects in mind for all that quilting cotton and canvas and jersey knit fabric, but sewing the giant plastic bin full of old jeans and that three yards of extra-wide flannel into the quilt of my dreams has certainly made a big dent in my hoard!

Here’s what I used for my quilt:

• soooo much denim. I’ll never lack for fabric to sew with if I can just keep outgrowing my jeans every few years! I’d like to thank Covid and perimenopause for sourcing much of this latest quilt for me.
• extra-wide flannel. I prefer to use thrifted sheets to back quilts, but in this case my thrifting luck deserted me, so I bought three years of extra-wide flannel. At about 108″ x 108″, it was nearly the perfect size to back my king-sized quilt. Just a little bit made it back into the fabric bin for later! The big box fabric store near me has a decent selection of extra-wide fabrics–I can at least get the color I’m aiming for, if not an exciting print.
• measuring, cutting, and sewing supplies. You need a sturdy machine to sew over all those denim seams, and a sharp sewing needle.

Step 1: Measure and Cut Log Cabin Pieces

The beauty of sewing a king-sized quilt is that it can be a giant square–anywhere between 90″ and 110″ looks good and fits the space well.

For a log cabin quilt, this means that you can sew the entire quilt as if it’s one giant log cabin quilt block!

Because I’m the laziest, I wanted to make my strips as wide as I could get away with. For the jeans I’ve got in my stash, 6″ wide was a good choice, resulting in the least waste and looking proportionate in the oversized quilt. But of course the beauty of a log cabin quilt is that you can be really creative with it, so feel free to have fun with your sizing.

When I had a huge stack of strips, I sewed them all into a single strip, short sides together. Because the denim was all different weights, I finger-pressed each seam to the side that felt thinner or lighter… or, tbh, just in the direction that it seemed to want to go. No reason to stop being lazy now!

I can’t even tell you how many pairs of jeans I used in this quilt, but I got through a lot of podcast episodes just cutting log cabin pieces!

Step 2: Sew a Center Panel (Optional)

You don’t have to have a special center panel for a log cabin quilt, and when I first sewed this half-square triangle from upcycled denim, I thought that it would be a pillow front. But sometimes items change their purpose when they’re on my sewing table, and this one became the center panel for my quilt!

Step 3: Piece the Oversized Log Cabin Quilt Block

I sewed my pieced strip around and around my center panel, cutting the strip even at the end of each seam and beginning it again on the adjacent side.

Cut this piece even with the quilt, turn the quilt 90 degrees, and keep sewing!

This quilt would have had more of a log cabin look–and a really stunning one, too!–if I’d used a single color per strip, but that would have taken a lot of effort to sort my denim by color, and as I’ve mentioned, I’m the laziest!

At the end of every podcast episode, my favorite thing was to lay the quilt out to see how it was growing.

Can you see where I spilled my ice water on the quilt top? This thing was so bulky and heavy to haul around, and it knocked everything off of every surface I passed when I carried it around.

When it got to the point of having to move furniture to make it fit, I knew that I was almost done!

Step 4: Add the back and binding.

Finally bought myself these sewing clips after eyeing them for years. They’re not quite as life-changing as I’d hoped, but they DO make quick work of pinning bulky seams like these!

I am in the process of working through my sadness that I didn’t actually quilt this, so don’t make me feel worse about it. I even had a cute design in mind, but my at-home sewing machine can only do so much! By the time I finished this, I wasn’t sure if I could even fit the entire thing under my sewing machine anymore. Next time, I’ll think through some kind of quilt-as-you-go method, perhaps.

As it was, my family had to help me move half the furniture in the family room to make space for me to lay down the flannel fabric, tape it taut, lay the quilt top over it, trim the backing to 2″ past the quilt on all sides, then double-fold it around the quilt and pin it.

Four more straight seams later, and the king-sized upcycled denim log cabin quilt of my dreams was done!

I should probably be more careful of it considering how much time I put into it, but I believe that quilts are meant to be used, and this giant quilt DOES make an excellent summer picnic blanket! It’s super heavy and warm, too, so I’m excited about using it this winter.

My new goal is to think up some throw pillow covers that I can also sew from upcycled denim, but that won’t be so matchy that it looks too country… Pixelated skulls, perhaps? Or maybe monograms?

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I Saw the Aurora Borealis Above My House

What a year of wonders it has been!

Honestly, the total solar eclipse alone would have been enough of a celestial wonder to sustain me at least through the rest of the year, but I have been spoiled with riches, because last weekend there was also the Aurora Borealis! ABOVE MY HOUSE!!!

And it turns out that the Aurora Borealis even works when there are clouds!

I mean, it definitely would have been better without the clouds, but thank goodness it still works with them. It might have even made it more spectacular in some ways, because never before in my life have I seen parti-colored clouds at night.

I used a long exposure for these photos to pick up all the Northern Lights that I could, so these photos are for sure brighter than we saw in person, but still, it was pretty bright! It wasn't so bright and distinctive that if I'd wandered outside having no idea what was going on I'd be all, "Ooh, the Aurora Borealis!", but it WAS bright enough that I'd definitely have been like, "Um, WHAT is wrong with the sky?!? Why is it pink? Are we experiencing a nuclear attack? Do we now have aliens?"

Without the long camera exposure, it looked more like this:

See? If you walked outside at 10:00 pm and you didn't know what was up you probably wouldn't immediately clock Northern Lights, but you would know SOMETHING was happening. Aliens, probably. Perhaps nuclear war. So it's nice that I did know what was going on, because instead of ducking and covering I could then be all, "Family! Come hither to experience magic and wonder with me!"

The family *kinda* experienced the magic and wonder with me for a little bit, but their patience for magic and wonder is far inferior to my own, I'm sorry to tell you. They were like, "Cool, pink sky! Someone tell Nick Drake! [two minutes pass] ...welp, now we've seen the Aurora! Bye!" and then they went back inside to their various unmagical and wonder-free pursuits. 

I, however, was going to be damned if I let a second of celestial magic and wonder pass me by, and fortunately, that's why god invented the lawn chair! It was also the perfect evening--cool and breezy (darn those clouds!), the frogs from the swampy backyard bellowing mating cries to compete with the distant sounds from the drive-in next door and the even more distance sounds of the racetrack a few miles away, early enough in the season that I didn't have to swat mosquitos--it was just about as good as springtime in Indiana gets.

The photo above is my greatest triumph--there's a little bit of camera shake, oops, but there's also the Aurora Borealis lighting up the Big Dipper, and in the bottom right of the photo I even caught a meteor!

I still want to see some proper, cloud-free, way-up-north Northern Lights one day, but these particular Northern Lights were a delightful, unexpected, probably once-in-a-lifetime-in-Indiana gift that I'm super happy got tacked onto my year.

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Homeschool Science: Periodic Table of the Elements Resources

Quick Pick Six Elements with my ten-year-old. I miss those long-ago days of literally homeschooling around our big family room table!

Throughout our entire homeschooling journey, I always LOVED studying the Periodic Table of the Elements with the kids. And tbh, I don't know if we came back to it so often because it was really always coming up in our studies... or because I was always making an excuse to come back to it!

For instance, in that same homeschool year as the photo above, we studied the Periodic Table of the Elements as part of a chemistry unit, a geology unit, and a history of science study. We came back to it over the years every time studied biology, every time we studied geology, that one time that we did the history of science study... and this last homeschool year, my high school Senior and I took one last spin through the Periodic Table as part of her Honors Chemistry lab science.

You won't be surprised, then, to learn that I've amassed a lot of resources relating to the Periodic Table of the Elements. Here are some that we've used over the years:

We have worked this PTOE puzzle SO many times!

• Quick Pick Six Elements. I printed the playing cards on card stock and the kids colored them; I don't usually put that much effort into a handmade material, but we have used the snot out of this game! There are some other element flash cards that are already colored in available here.
• Interactive Periodic Table of the Elements. Click on one of the elements, and you can see images and descriptions. It's probably better for younger kids. This interactive Periodic Table of the Elements is better for older students.
• Periodic Table of Mistakes. After your kids have learned how the Periodic Table is organized, present them with this and see if they can spot all of the mistakes!
• PTOE Cookies. You know how we love baking delicious things for school! I really want to make cookies or cupcakes of the entire Periodic Table.
• Element Collection. How large of a collection can you accrue? I also think it would be fun to organize this as a scavenger hunt--how many elements do you already own?
• Lewis Dot Diagram of the Elements. Try this one instead of your standard Periodic Table.
• Build a Periodic Table of the Elements. Here's a big project for the semester--build your own wall-sized Periodic Table! If you don't need as much hand-holding, here's a free download that shows you how to set up this assignment.
• Egg Carton Periodic Table. Make your own Periodic Table of the Elements out of egg cartons.
• Periodic Table of Videos. TED-Ed has a lesson for every element in the Periodic Table.
• Cartoon Elements. Need your elements anthropomorphized? Here you go!
• PTOE Battleship. Here's a great way to get kids comfortable with pronouncing (or trying to pronounce!) the names of the elements.
• Periodic Table of the Elements Lapbook. My kids never got into lapbooks, although I do sometimes have them complete some of the smaller elements to include in the notebooks that they do keep.
• Chemical Element Trump Cards. Here's another card game, this one available as a free download.
• Element Coloring Pages. You can only get a few of the pages for free, but if your kiddo enjoys them, you could buy the book!
• Montessori Three-Part Cards of the Elements. A Montessori kid would adore these.
• Blank Table. Why not just write in your own?
• Cross-stitch Elements. This probably isn't for the kids, but I now deeply desire to make an entire cross-stitch Periodic Table of the Elements. Or maybe Perler beads?
• Cheater quilt. You can print the table, itself, onto quilting cotton via Spoonflower, and then sew it yourself, or use it as a beginner sewing project to do with the kids. Kids love hand-quilting! This one, on the other hand, is more of a patchwork sewing project, but you lose the element info. 
• Poster. We have always LOVED our large-format anchor charts over here. The bigger they are, the more room the kids have to draw and glue things all over them!

We also watch a lot of YouTube videos when we study something. When the kids were little I pre-screened videos before I watched with them, but I always had several go-to sources that I knew would be good. You might want to add these to your Watch List sooner rather than later, because you know how things are with YouTube--today's video is tomorrow's static!

And here are our FAVORITE favorite resources--THE BOOKS!!!!!!!!!

• The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Elements
• The Disappearing Spoon
• The Stardust That Made Us
• The Periodic Table: A Visual Guide to the Elements
• The Secret Life of the Periodic Table
• The Periodic Table: Elements with Style
• The Elements Book: A Visual Encyclopedia of the Periodic Table

Although all my kids are officially done with all of their homeschool studies as of this week, you're probably still going to find me doing my own little PTOE crafts now and then. I want to find a way to make a Periodic Table quilt that is both patchwork AND has the info for each element, for instance... I guess when both the kids go off to college in the fall, my partner and I can spend our lonely evenings designing element quilt blocks for Spoonflower to print for me!

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Homeschool High School Chemistry: A Historical and Artistic Look at the Periodic Tables of the Elements

Twenty-ish years ago, when I was studying for my Master's in Library Science, I took a class entitled The Organization and Representation of Knowledge and Information.

It was... just as fussy and pedantic of a class as you'd imagine from the title. I thought my instructor was fussy and pedantic, I thought the structure of the assignments was fussy and pedantic, and after two or three years of English grad school by that time, I found the endless class debates over the philosophy of how to organize and represent some specific piece of knowledge or information to be just the worst kind of parody of grad school education.

I just looked, and the school DOES still offer that exact class, but the syllabus is completely different! It looks so practical now! I might have come out of that class with a genuinely marketable skill, dang it!

ANYWAY, I was not my best self in that class (actually, I might have been in the early stages of pregnancy in that class, now that I think if it. Wonder if that had anything to do with my mindset, ahem?), and the only thing that I really remember from it is that there are infinite ways to organize and represent knowledge and information. The trick is to figure out the best one!

So when my teenager and I took what I knew would be the last of our numerous pass-throughs of the Periodic Table of the Elements this past school year, I decided to shake up our usual look at the Table as an unquestioned artifact by instead exploring its history, and some of the MANY variations the structure has taken in the quest to find the absolutely most perfect iteration. 

This was a great topic to move into soon after our lesson on alchemy, because scientists have been trying to organize the elements since before the only elements were earth, air, water, and fire! Here's one of the beautiful tables that we looked at first:

Tria Prima image via Mark R. Leach

Most of our Periodic Tables were taken from the Internet Database of Periodic Tables run by Mark R. Leach. With every table that we looked at, it was interesting to discuss why that table was arranged the way it was--what organizational problems it tried to solve, what patterns it tried to create--as well as what organizational issues that table caused, leading to yet another iteration. And of course one mustn't neglect the artistic merits of each table!

The teenager and I are both hands-on learners, so, for instance, we both liked this table from 1814:

Wollaston's Physical Slide Rule of Chemical Equivalents image via Mark R. Leach

It's a Periodic Table because it's ordered based on the weights of the elements, but you can see why it would be somewhat impractical for many purposes. What schoolchild could afford it? Who could manage carrying it around for ready reference?

Emerson's Helix from 1911 is prettier, and much more practical to put one's hands on:

Emerson's Helix image via Mark R. Leach

But you can already see it's not going to work with as many elements as we have today.

THIS Periodic Table of the Elements, though--THIS one really gets into the meat of what personally interests me about how the elements are organized:

Rare Earth Pop Out Periodic Table image via Mark R. Leach

There is just not a practical way--one that also makes sense!--to get all those elements into one nice, neat, lined-up table. Something always wants to stick out!

I really like this 3D pyramid from 1983; it's organized so that each side represents one type of atomic orbital... mostly. 

Or you can organize the elements based on your own usage of them: this 3D cube has the elements sized "in approximate proportion to their importance in cement chemistry."

And to be honest, I can't work out how this table from 2008 even works, or how one is meant to read it:

Angular Form of the Periodic Table image via Mark R. Leach

It's VERY pretty, though! I would happily work it as a puzzle!

Since, alas, we do not have an Angular Form of the Periodic Table puzzle, we happily reworked our good old 1,000-piece PTOE puzzle that we've reworked many times before--

I had thought that it might interest the teenager to create an art piece organizing the elements in any unique way that she chose--a Minecraft creation, perhaps, or a menagerie. A PowerPoint organized by vibes. A series of ceramic vessels. She wasn't feeling inspired by the prompt, though--it's possible that I've brought up the PTOE maybe a couple of too many times over the past 12 years, ahem--and part of the fun of being a homeschooler who chooses your own adventures is also NOT choosing adventures, so an artistic, unique Periodic Table did not become part of her Art of Chemistry portfolio.

Instead, we colored ourselves anchor charts of the table that we've all agreed to know and love today, internalizing, as we did, how this particular knowledge and information is organized and represented:

While we worked we listened to The Disappearing Spoon on audiobook, because I'll be damned if I don't sneak in just a LITTLE more Periodic Table content before this last year of homeschooling ends!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I Am Literally Repotting the Same Plant 100 Times a Year

I'm pretty sure I don't have enough friends, because I always have WAAAAAY too many inch plants!

And aloe plants... and spider plants...

I've been baby-stepping my way through learning gardening for the past twenty-ish years or so (why did my grandpa never teach me how to work in his garden? I don't think it ever would have occurred to me to ask to be included in all the adult things the adults around me did, but it's weird that they never offered to teach me all the little skills that were supposed to make up their legacy. Give a shrug for the weirdness of families, I guess!), and in that time I've learned maybe five things. I've learned, as well, that I don't have a knack for gardening the way I do for handicrafts, but I DO have the patience for it in the way that I do NOT for cooking. 

Along the way, I've found out many plants that I wish I could keep alive but in fact cannot, among them Boston ivy, fern, and African violet, all of which I long to keep indoors in hanging pots, and none of which seem to find a life of that nature worth living with me. I have also discovered some plants that I cannot kill, who, in fact, seem to thrive under my ham-handedly neglectful care: spider plant, inch plant, aloe vera, snake plant. 

Those of you who actually know how to garden will recognize that these are the absolutely most easiest plants to care for on the entire planet, but still. Let me have my small victories, please.

The problem is that these plants are so happy that they're always dividing and conquering and making more of themselves, and I don't have enough friends to give them to and I can't bring myself to throw them away, so once a year or so I gather them all up, put them all on a table out on the deck--

--and repot them all into even more and even bigger pots, which I then have to figure out where to put. 

Y'all. I have SO many pots of inch plants. I have so many pots of spider plants, most of which I've also stuck a couple of inch plants into. I have SO MANY pots of aloe vera, most of which I've stuck a couple of inch plants into, some of which I've also stuck a spider plant into, as well. 

At my Girl Scout troop's last Bridging/Graduation party, I had the brilliant idea to bring along all of my million smaller plant babies and set up an activity for the kids to make their own potted plant setups in the Dollar Store fishbowls that we used to use for fishbowl punch:

This worked out great, and a few of the kids have reported that their own inch plants and spider plants are now bursting the seams of that Dollar Store pot and they need to repot and divide them. 

Mwa-ha-ha, the curse continues!

It's finally nice enough outside (the average last frost date in my area is May 10, so I'm cutting it a little close, but I think it'll be fine) to set up my outdoor garden areas, and so I just divided up plants AGAIN, somehow finding five more giant pots for aloe vera and inch plants to share, and putting them in an outdoor area that I *think* won't have too much sun for the aloe vera? We'll see. But if I still don't have enough friends in the fall, they'll have to come back inside, so I might as well start on making even more macrame plant hangers. And when the kids go back to college I can fill up all THEIR sunny windows, as well, way more than the couple of measly plants each that they've already let me put in.

Well, the teenager has three plants in her room, but I don't think she knows about the third one. Ahem.

But this is also the second summer in a row that the catnip that dies out in its big outdoor garden pot came back with a vengeance, so I accepted defeat, divided IT up into a billion smaller outdoor pots--

--and my plan is to try to bring those in over the winter, as well.

And the decade-old strawberry plants that my college kid has been tending in a plot in the side yard seem to have finally died of old age last year, so the other day I told her that I'd buy her some new strawberry plants and we headed over to the local greenhouse together. While she looked for strawberry plants, I picked up another basil plant, a few kale starts, a rosemary that the teenager had been asking for so she could use its cuttings for baking, and a little geranium that claims to repel mosquitos... you know, just to keep the strawberry plants company in the cart.

But then it turns out that the greenhouse had actually run out of strawberry plants, but I couldn't put the plants I had already been carting around back. I mean, we'd already bonded! So I bought them, and now I have to remember to move both the rosemary and the geranium inside if they've survived... so that's two more plants that will be indoors. Seven if you count the aloe/inch plants that I divided. Eight with the dwarf pomegranate, which hardly counts because I move that back inside every year, but I DID just put it into a bigger pot, actually, so maybe it does count. 

I mean, the kids won't even be here this fall. I could just fill their entire rooms with plants...

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I Apparently Went to Nashville Just to Eat, Sleep, and Shop

When my partner invited me along to his graphic design conference in Nashville, Tennessee, I thought that I was going to use my tagalong time very differently, ahem.

Without the distraction of all the other million things there are to do on my property, not to mention the kids and the pets, just think of all the writing and photo editing I could do! No spending half the day sewing, or taking a spontaneous bookstore trip with a teenager or two, or puttering around transplanting lilacs--instead, I could bring my laptop and all the books I'd been meaning to review and get so darn ahead on my freelance pieces and my personal blog that I wouldn't have to touch the computer again all summer if I didn't feel like it.

Ooh, and the sightseeing! We've gone to Nashville as a family several times, but of course the rest of the family's interests don't quite overlap my own, so this time I could really dive into the honky-tonk tourist sites. I could do the Johnny Cash Museum this time, or sit in one of the open-front bars on Broadway, or even just walk around the Country Music Hall of Fame again on my own agenda. Or I could go visit The Hermitage! I could finally eat some Nashville hot chicken!

Look, here are my guide books to prove that I really did have plans!

My motivation continued throughout the four-hour drive, as I texted the kids photos of us crossing the Ohio River--

--and the scenic, wildfire smoke-infused skies:

But then... I dunno. We checked into the Gaylord Opryland Resort (just a short walk from the new location of the Grand Ole Opry! Which I planned to tour!), and my partner headed straight off to his first conference activity, while I orienteered myself and the luggage through this baffling and overwhelming--though very pretty!--garden sanctuary--

--to our room, where I somehow found myself putting the air conditioning on high, closing the curtains, turning the TV on to the exact mumbly volume level that I find relaxing as hell, and then flopping onto the bed and snoozing away for several hours. 

It was... delightful, actually! The room was dim, I could hear a waterfall somewhere outside the window--and you KNOW how delightful rushing water sounds!--the temperature was perfect, and although I had all these plans that I could be enacting, it just felt like there was nothing I really needed to do and nowhere I really needed to be, so I might as well be sleepy.

OMG y'all, is this how those vacation-type people feel when they're on vacation? Like, those vacation people who don't travel to see all the sites and do the stuff, but instead just want to lie on the beach and eat yummy things? The ones who leave home just so they can relax for a minute?

If so, y'all, it's NICE!

I snoozled away the entire rest of the morning like that, and rallied only so that I could meet my partner at one of the on-site restaurants for lunch--because even when the promise of sightseeing fails to motivate me, the promise of food always does!

After tacos--and a margarita for me, because after all, *I'M* not on the clock! I'm on vacation!--I figured that since I had my pants and shoes back on and everything, I maybe should go out and do something. I found my way out the front door of the resort--which is not as easy and it sounds!--and found a quite lovely, quite well-marked walking path that led around the giant building and towards the Grand Ole Opry.

See, I'm headed right there, and I have the selfie to prove it!

I crossed the giant parking lot, found the sidewalk in front of the Grand Ole Opry, passed the family of geese without getting chased or bitten... and then I took a right turn and went to the mall instead.

And that is somehow where I spent the rest of the entire afternoon!

But to be fair, there was much that I had to do there. I found a store that had the exact style of pants that I knew the teenager would love, so then of course I had to send her many photos of the options and engage in a detailed text-based back and forth about color and style and sizing. Would she like the grey, or a less-traditional-for-her green? Would she perhaps prefer to go completely off-book and try the khaki?

She went with grey and green. I don't think she's ever worn khaki on purpose.

And then, of course, there was a LEGO store, which there is not at my mall at home, so obviously this was the time to buy birthday gifts and maybe a couple of stocking stuffers. I mean, is this not the perfect birthday gift for my older kid or what?

Ooh, today I learned that there's an off-label lighting kit for this LEGO set! I'll have to look into that for her next gift-giving holiday...

I was just about shopped out by the time my partner texted that he was almost done with his conference stuff for the day, so we both got back to our room at about the same time, and since we were both tired, it made sense that we spent the evening just vegging in our room, eating takeout burgers and watching hotel cable.

Okay, so that's one day down, and two days to go. Plenty of time left to do all that writing and photo editing and all that sightseeing I'd planned. 

Except that the next day, I sort of did the same thing again? But lazier? I slept in, I ambled around the resort a bit and bought myself a coffee, I brought my nook with me and sat somewhere pretty and read for absolute hours, I met my partner for lunch, and then I went back to the room and took a giant nap.

And when my partner was done with conference stuff for the day, and we could have gone into Nashville to walk Broadway and dip in and out of honky-tonks, I instead suggested that we walk over to an outdoor concert at the Grande Ole Opry--

--and after hanging out there for a while, I convinced him to go where else but back to THE MALL with me. I don't even know, you guys! But I hadn't gotten a Cinnabon the previous day, and I wanted one!

Goal achieved!

My final day at the resort was actually minimally more productive, since I had to check out and move all our luggage to the car, so that put an end to my previously endless napping. Instead, I spent the day sitting by the river, listening to the spiel of the occasional guided boat tours (?!?), and trading chapters of my book with editing a few photos now and then. The kids texted constantly with all those queries of the teenager who thinks they're being smooth about the fact that their parents will return home shortly from an out-of-town trip--"Mom, where's the steam mop?" "Mom, what do you do with the trash bag if it's already full?"--so that was also entertaining.

And then my partner finished up his last conference activity, we played Marco Polo by text to find each other, and off we went back home! No Hermitage. No Johnny Cash Museum. Definitely no summer's worth of freelance posts! No travel activities to speak of, really, other than the fact that I got a decent amount of the year's birthday and Christmas shopping done... which is not nothing, I guess, so I suppose it was a fairly productive trip, after all.

It WAS pretty nice, though, to come home from a trip all caught up on sleep, for a change, all super relaxed and with no desire to take to my bed for a couple of days to recover. And coming home to a spick-and-span home well-run by the two teenagers in my absence did not hurt, either.

And if the house smelled suspiciously of bleach and Pine Sol, and we were surprisingly nearly out of paper towels even though I'd just bought a huge multi-pack right before we'd left, and I'm pretty sure we used to own more forks than this, well... teenagers deserve a bit of a vacation, too!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!