Quilt Success!

I woke up to fresh snow on Tuesday with a lot more dumping from the sky, and since it was my full day off I decided to use the time to get a portion of my T-shirt quilt done!  After interfacing squares all day, I connected the strips of shirts together before heading down to the climbing gym for three hours full of every 5.11 in the gym.  I think the success of getting that far on my quilt pushed my climbing success, but that's just me. :)

Last night, while my kitchen was taken over by beer brewers, I spent my evening fending off kittens:

and sewing together all the strips of shirts into one big quilt top!  

The more strips that I added, the bigger and more awkward working with the quilt became.  Luckily I had some tasty organic wine and some extremely helpful kittens to make the process easier, and boy did it feel good to hold this up:

The best part is, it fits perfectly on the full-size bed I got as a hand-me-down from my grandparent's old house!  

Especially with the edging, it'll drape beautifully over the sides.  I'm pretty excited to finish this thing off.  Next step is heading to the fabric store sometime in the next day or so (perhaps tonight!) before the next round of snow hits this weekend to get fabric for the quilt back and fabric for the binding on the sides.  Still haven't decided if I actually want batting or not- maybe a little bit, to fend off the chilly Minnesotan winter!

Tomorrow night and Sunday afternoon are dedicated to training for climbing- I'm beginning to follow a 6-week training schedule to prepare for climbing hard this summer without burning out.  

A large part of this is getting 4 days of climbing per week, at least 1-2 hours every time I train.  I'm countering that with teaching tap and running or biking almost every day to get my cardio up from absolute crap really bad less than steller performance.  My next "race" is coming up a week from this Saturday- I'm running in the Mustache March run up here in Duluth, a whopping 2.65 miles along the lakewalk.  After a winter of no cardio, I'm hoping to have fun at this race and finish ahead of competitors that are around twice my age (I had to push to finish my last 5K in front of a 70-year old man), plus get motivated for spring training. Woowoo!

A big step, though, would be having a wonderfully warm quilt to sleep under.  Good thing I've got that well underway... ;)