Have you been crazy busy too? It's nuts, isn't it – how busy we all are? That's why I haven't posted in the last few days. I could go through the litany of what I've been up to: sewing together half square triangles until I could just scream, there's Mom doings, grandkid doings, preparing for the house remodel, you get the idea. The good news is that I am making progress on multiple fronts and am feeling a little less cranky.

I'm going to take the easy way out today and give you links to some great things I've found online. First, a list of 21 beautiful phone apps. I've downloaded some. My favorite is Overgram, which lets you add words to an Instagram image:

While I was sewing the endless string of HSTs, I listened to some excellent TED Talks. This one, by Dan Ariely, is about what motivates us to work. I will remember this.

And the next talk is about how health care ought to be, by Eric Dishman. It caught me as I was worrying about a new spot on my arm. I found out yesterday that it is what my mom calls a 'liver spot'. No worries. But there was a brief period this weekend when I was thinking about melanoma and I really wanted our health care system to be what Mr. Dishman describes.

If you have time, there is a nice group of 8 TED talks, all linked together. Click here. I've listened to half of them and look forward to hearing the rest. Now I am going to sit down and applique for a couple of hours. Oh happy day!

I met with the contractor, Rick, and cabinet maker, Todd, yesterday. It was so nice to plan the cabinet configuration! The basic layout of the kitchen won't change, but the cabinet spaces will. More on that as time goes by.

Rick wants me to choose pretty much everything now. Once it's all in, he'll be able to gut and replace different areas pretty quickly. Shopping… that's doesn't sound bad at all, does it? It's a good thing that 1) I've been thinking about this for a long time and 2) I don't have problems making decisions.

I found the double oven and gas range on Wednesday. Steve looked at them, agreed that they were what he wanted also, and bought them. 

I did more on Wednesday… In our bathroom, we're taking out the tub and replacing it with a walk-in shower. The vanity will be re-built and will be counter-top height. The room is small, I'm keeping the palette light and bright. Here's the tile for the shower walls and floor. The color is more like the top left in the photo – lighter and whiter than it looks in most of the photo.

There will be a 6" band of accent tiles slightly above eye level in the shower. It's a mix of glass and white quartz pieces:

The floor of the shower will be these river rocks that have been flattened:

I think the grout will be a light to medium gray throughout. The vanity top is a very white Silestone, sort of terrazo-looking thing. I don't have the sample any more and failed to take a photo. 

Today I drove to Dallas and found the granite slab for the kitchen. I didn't think I wanted granite. A lot of it is busier than our kitchen could stand. I thought I'd want Corian or Silestone but after seeing friends' kitchens and feeling a variety of countertops, I decided to look at granite to see if I could find a slab that was mostly white with some black. There were a surprising number of choices but this is the one that has my name on it:

This is it from a distance, not a close-up. It looks a little more yellow here than it does in person. I think it's going to look good with the white cabinets and natural hickory floors.

You might wonder where Steve is when I'm doing all this picking. He's happily not joining me as I do it. I am very lucky that he trusts me to make it all look good together. He was only particular about the range and some of the cabinet layout. Being able to make decisions on my own and not 'in committee' absolutely makes this sort of job easier. I like that a lot!

And so is the Applique Caddy! If you haven't seen the video, it tells you all about it. You can order the applique caddy here.

And, of course, the Best-Ever Applique Sampler is on my shelves, ready to ship to you. I'll send a newsletter tomorrow but for now, you know it first! Click here for more.

I'm home from being gone for 9 days. So much to do and you'd think I'd have been organized enough to make a detailed to-do list on the plane home. I didn't. However I did find a link to a post on Buzzfeed with 21 incredibly helpful lists (those are their words, but the lists are indeed very helpful). For example:

What I really need a list for is 'how to choose everything for a remodeling project' because that's what I spent the day on. We are about to begin kitchen/bathroom/other stuff remodeling project. We are not doing this one ourselves because neither of us have the time to do it. It will be a new and amazing experience to pay to have this sort of work done. 

The contractor, Rick Owens, comes highly recommended and I like him a lot. He returns calls and shows up when he says he will. All very important. Since I work at home he is working with me to keep the disruptions to as short a time-frame as possible. The plan is to order everything, get the cabinets made, and then he will gut the house in sections and put it back together. Then move on.

My biggest quandry at the moment is which flooring to go with. We are doing the whole house and the floors are a very serious expense. Here's the Bellawood engineered floor which can be glued to our slab, in natural hickory…

Or the solid bamboo that would be a floating floor. The one I like best is darker and has a stronger pattern.

Here's what it looks like in a customer's photo. Those dark areas are nearly black.

I like it but am not sure what it's like to live with this much pattern on a floor. Do any of you have something like this? How do you like it? I should add that the Bellawood is half again as much as the bamboo which equals a lot of money. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

I ran across Sightseer, by Roger Minick. Read more about him here. And/or just look at the 1980s era vacation photos. I could be in one of them – certainly I have vacation photos that look like they belong here.

Really, what can a person say? I wish I could look back at my own vacation photos and dress differently but, on that day, I know I dressed in a way that I thought was perfect for the event and that I didn't mind being photographed in. Case in point is the photo below – me and Steve by the same Disney castle.

All I can say is that I hope over time I can do better :-). Every vacation presents a new opportunity!

When I was in Georgetown, I met Judi Tyrrell who shared a couple of her quilts-in-progress with me. They are wonderful and she said I could share them with you. Here's her version of Chirps (from Applique With Attitude, set differently than the one in the book, more like the way I set the class quilt that I made):

And her version of Fresh Picked Posies. The background is constructed the way we show in the book, Applique Outside the Lines. Judi is still working on the borders – she said she'd send a photo when it's all together.

Pretty wonderful, don't you think?