A Contemplative Life

I saw these earlier today and snapped them late this afternoon. Reminds me of some of the fabrics I encountered, hehehe. After I finished cutting fabric today, I had some four and a half inch wide strips left, and I put them in a tote notable for four and a half inch wide strips, among other scraps. I carried the tote into the living room with the desire to go through it later. Well, I just did so, and to my delight, what amounts to at least an entire quilt top/back is waiting for me to piece it together. Maybe more like two tops/backs, what with MANY strips as well as two stacks of varied sizes of large scraps, my goodness! It was like revisiting the last five-plus years of my stash, perhaps longer. One particular autumnal-hued piece went into the autumn-6.5" stack to be cut into squares, while another small collection of already cut 4.5" squares went into another tote. Only a few pieces were tossed from prints I don't need, and those pieces were small. Funny to think ho...

That writing a novel about miracles feels to defy the heartless and predatory natures currently wreaking havoc on our planet, which must be deterred as best we are able. I was going to write this post in the morning, Saturday morning. It's still Friday evening in California, Pacific Standard Time, lol. The time change occurs this weekend, we'll lose an hour. I've whinged about it already, far better things for me to blather on about tonight. Like how I wrote a pretty nice chapter this morning, hehehe! My novel about miracles is about a third-ish of the way there, or here, or somewhere. It's in a place virtually, existing on hard drives and flash drives, yet firmly wedged in my heart, giving me strength at a time when so much feels uncertain. Ironically, I ended today's chapter with a bit of a cliffhanger, HAH! My poor characters, put through various wringers with only 32K words accumulated. But as I said a post or three ago, writing about miracles means a fair amoun...

Title from something my husband found weird but good this morning, lol. I have no idea what he referred to; this morning feels like 2023, in that I spent much of the morning seated just outside the coop, sifting wood ash for the dustbathing box, and wrote this post mid-afternoon, and now it's evening as it's uploaded. Anyway, those chickens were digging and scratching nearby as I sang along to Kate Bush's Aerial album, side one, or however it's delineated. The side with "King of the Mountain" and "Pi" and "Mrs. Bartolozzi". Actually I listened to that side about four times because the music player on my phone doesn't stop at an LPs end. Which was great today because it took me over ninety minutes to shovel poo, sift through ash, add ash and sand and dirt and rice hulls to the dustbox as chickens hung out, some resting on the straw-littered concrete as if it was part of their coop. Maybe they think it is: Weird but good. I think Weird bu...

The breaks in the cloud are faint, but cannot be dismissed! The sun isn't shining, a menacing marine layer keeping those of us along the North Coast aching in the gray. However to the southeast a break in the mundane is trying to emerge. This delicious light stirs me to write this post, because despite it being the high days of summer, our landscape has felt like the dark days of late autumn for too damn long. A metaphor perhaps for all that blankets our current world scene? Sure! Big ugly legislation, miserable conditions everywhere we turn, natural disasters wreaking havoc, tender souls wrenched from reality; all these traumas want to strip our joy, leave us bereft. I woke to another gray morning, assuming the flat dull horizon would remain. However peeks of brightness remind me that all is not lost. Goodness prevails. Does this mean the sun and blue sky are about to muscle in, shoving the dreariness aside? No. The marine layer is far too entrenched for that to occur AT THIS MOME...

Done! And so much fun in the doing. I finished the Lego rainbow puzzle. Another puzzle is on the table, edge pieces accumulated. It's more monotone, not sure how it's going to be. I am SO PLEASED to have these in my stash and cannot WAIT to use them! In fabric news, I've accumulated several prints from Guicy Guice's Entwine collection from 2021(???). I'd wanted to EPP these beauties into a quilt, then considered machine-piecing them instead. Then today I stacked up what I've gathered, some extra wovens included for good measure, and in doing so realized machine piecing is probably not the correct manner, or at least in stitching squares that would have measured three and a half inches once sewn. Instead I'm back to hand-sewing, or planning to hand-stitch once I've chosen an appropriate fabric for the center X, in white/light cream. As I was telling my husband, English paper piecing with low volume fabrics is tricky, as often the folded-in seam allowance ...

  Current state of Alexandria, missing three hexagon blocks to complete this round. Painstaking also applies to the sudden reemergence of a pinched nerve in my right shoulder, shoot! So yeah, a slight detour from how I was going to wax poetically about prepping to move onto the next phase. Or not. Huh. Didn't see that coming. Nor could I have fathomed what happened to a beloved childhood landmark of mine; early this morning the Bidwell Mansion was destroyed by fire. HEARTBREAKING! Northern California is my birthplace, and I visited the mansion many times in my youth. Makes me ill pondering all that was lost, especially on the heels of the destructive Park Fire that burned Upper Bidwell Park this past summer, and let's not forget the Camp Fire that ravaged Paradise in 2018. Again, I feel queasy considering these events, hard to separate myself from them merely to talk about a quilt. Perhaps what I need to consider is how FLEETING are possessions, even parts of this planet. Ani...

Over this stormy weekend, snippets of blue sky have lightened my heart. We've been lucky to not have lost power, and I've enjoyed fixing soups and other warm dishes that lately I haven't bothered with, but this kind of weather calls for a variety of one-pot meals. This kind of weather puts me in a sewing mood, so this morning I cut fabrics for EPP stars and whatever else lends itself to English paper piecing. I'll spend the afternoon listening to the Warriors/Celtics basketball game, tending the fire, maybe tackling revisions of The Hawk , probably some slow stitching on the Cornflower quilt or diving into that stack of shapes and scraps, diamonds and jewels and a few hexies aching to be clothed with pretty prints. Spring is so close; I feel it in the fabrics, in the lengthening daylight, in how green is the grass and trees producing small buds, a few ahead of schedule. Despite this chilly spate of weather, the brighter skies make me hopeful, setting aside the darkness ...

  The first finish of 2024 to hang on the laundry line. It's not often one gets to blog on the twenty-ninth of February, lol. I've been busy wrapping up a quilt, a quilt block, and making a little mess of some marvelous six-point diamonds, but they can be absorbed into the Flock of Stars quilt, so I'm not going to berate myself for one night of faffing about. Life is meant to be lived, not meted out in a draconian fashion. Ahem. Perhaps I'm feeling so generous with myself because a book cover is underway, a manuscript is formatted for release, synopses are written, genres chosen. LOL! Mostly I'm feeling unencumbered because 1) I finished the languishing baby quilt, pictured at the top of this entry. 2) I completed the appliqued onesies and mailed off the quilt and onesies to their new home. A flock of onesies. 3) I wrapped up the Cornflower block, even getting it washed, and now have a decision to make concerning how I want to hand-quilt that project, as well as whe...

Our western view a couple of evenings ago. A month ago I started taking an online course on how to sew angles. I knew that I wasn't going to just dive right into this new element of stitching, filing away each course after a quick read-through of that week's topic. Quickly I realized this course would be something I'd give proper consideration to much further ahead, perhaps early in 2024, what with the end of 2023 zipping right along as though each day signified the end of the world as we know it. I mean, here it is, the fourth of October! Where have the last nine months gone, truly I ask, without delving into the deeper query of what about the last five years, eight years, two freaking decades??? Ahem, okay, calm down Present Me, and focus on the post at hand. Today's post is about accepting how suddenly, a mere month into this course about angles, I really have no aching desire to sew triangles or diamonds or parallelograms unless they are English paper pieced. I don...

Rainbow quilt top done! I don't know exactly how many fat quarters I cut a few weeks ago, but it was A LOT. Plus I threw in a couple of fat quarter-ish pieces from my solids' stash, which made for a plethora of three, six, and eight-inch squares, when excising the seam allowances. Yesterday I finished the rainbow quilt, taking some nice shots of it on our laundry line that really only gets used for photo ops. The sun has been shining lately, perfect weather for displaying quilts, two others you can see on my Instagram account. The bright weather also lends itself to vibrantly hued quilts, and I'm thinking as soon as I make the back for the one above I'll design another with the spare squares. One more baby quilt remains on my current list of quilting To Do's, but we'll see how long the rainbow squares will hold out; I'm also in mood to use up various cut fabrics that are cluttering what little surface area exists in my office/sewing room. I'm in a mood ...