Something for Freecycle

We seem to have an extra cat bed:



Because apparently this cat bed was made to hold 35 pounds of cat:

The Old Grey Mare .... is me!

And I ain't what I used to be. I used to be rested and have energy to spare. Many long years ago.

I didn't actually finish anything this week, so no 'hey, I actually finished this' pictures. Hopefully soon, but work does get in the way occasionally.

Work is going well but weird. I'm teaching 4 classes this month. I've never taught more than 2 a month and in this shortest of all months I'm teaching 4. They last all day. I have a lot of fun, but I do get tired and Sunday nights seem to come very soon. And, I have my regular work to accomplish still. Boy, do I need to work on my time-management skills!

I taught an extra-long class on Long Island on Friday which made for a very long (but rewarding) day. Saturday my husband and I drove to Millbrook to see an exhibit of quilts by one of my customers. I quilted the quilts. It's always interesting to see some of my older work.



This one has my swirls in a shiny variegated thread.



The winding ways has tons of cat fabrics in it. All of the quilting is geometric done with white thread.



This one was done with a ginger variegated thread in clamshells. I did this the old-fashioned way. No Groovy-Boards. No Circle-Lord templates. I used a circle template and made each clamshell. One. At. A. Time. Painful, but it came out quite nicely.



This large pink quilte was from quite some time ago. A lot of subtle meandering and feathers in the borders. I didn't quilt the jacket on the left or the small wallhanging on the right. They were done by the artist.

The exhibit is at the Millbrook Library. There's an event on February 25th that I'll probably go to and support my customer. She's one talented lady.

For those of you who don't know, I live outside of New York City. I live in the woods, but I can be in Manhattan in about 1-1/2 hours. Millbrook is a town about 40 minutes from here. It's very popular with the city-folk. Lots of antique stores and gallery type places. Fun to drive to and visit occasionally but I'll stay out here with the deer, thankyouverymuch.

And since I'm bored, I started another quilt for myself. There's a Yahoo Group working on a Women of the Bible study and a quilt that corresponds with it. The first woman we studied was Eve and the first block was the Garden of Eden.



There will be over fifty 6-inch squares. I changed the colors from the pattern. The yellow represents the sun. The green stripe represents the vegetation. Even though I picture Eden to be lush and tropical, I chose a stripe because God created order out of chaos and I believe the garden was well-planned. The blue stripes represent the four headwaters: the Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates Rivers. The green clover in the middle represents the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. I think the colors in this block are a little odd, but when they are next to the other colors I picked for this quilt, I think it'll work out well. I was originally going to set the blocks in black, but I'm now thinking a Moda Marble in light blue? We'll see what the quilt wants to be when it gets there.

My body is acknowledging the recent extra work and lack of sleep, so maybe I'll listen and hit the sack now. Or surf the web some more. Probably the second one. It would be awful to wake up refreshed tomorrow morning, now wouldn't it?

Is life good, or what?

My husband is fine. He slid off the road and into a tree during a snowstorm on Friday night. The damage is across the entire front of the car, but this view was most photogenic. We now get to spend more quality time together when I drive him to work so I can have my car.

This week's gratitudes:

1. Having an airbag set properly so it didn't deploy and injure my husband
2. Car insurance and a good body shop
3. Reminders of what are 'big things' and what are 'little things'.

___

A short story to help explain the depth of my gratitude:

When I was in 10th grade, there was this really, really cute senior named J. He was so smart and so funny and he would never want to go out with me.

I was at a marching band party one night when there was a phone call. J had been in a car accident on his way there and no one knew how serious it was. He had fallen asleep behind the wheel and hit a telephone pole. He was unconscious and there was a possible injury to his spinal cord. In the weeks that followed, he regained consciousness and began his long recovery from compression fractures to C4 and C5 (Christopher Reeves broke C2 and C3 just for reference). J's recovery was slow and the long-term diagnosis was hemiplegia (sp?). He was partially paralyzed on one side of his body and lost sensation on the other side of his body.

During this recovery, we began dating (I still am amazed he wanted to go out with me) and married when I graduated from high school. In the intervening years, J has pursued a few master degrees, maintained employment with a large techie company, and raised 2 children. He did well.

Seeing the car on Friday night reminded me how different the outcome could have been.

Friday already?

Judy has posted a quilt-for-an-hour-a-day project. I pulled some fabric from the stash and worked for an hour today to cut it all out.

Here's my progress:



Last night I finished the binding on this small quilt:



I don't like it. It was made from the scraps of a quilt that I did like. A good lesson in design and proportion and all that. I did finish it though, and it'll go to some charity.

Tomorrow I'm teaching all day and Sunday I'm going to a Souper-Bowl sewing class at a not-so-local quilt shop.

Happy quilting!

January's Tally

Even though I still have more fabric than I can possibly use in 3 lifetimes, in January I have completed the following:

7 Quilts
1 block caddy
1 pair of socks
1 mohair wrap
1 pincushion
1 embroidered tote bag

On to February!