Grandsons on the Go

Once again, we've been on the road. For the first time since QuiltCon 2020 - back in late February 2020 - we got to spend time with our two Texas grandsons: 7 year-old Luke and 10 year-old Austin. They have grown and changed so much! It was great to be with them, mostly at the swimming pool, finishing a 1000-piece Star Wars puzzle, bedtime reading, and going on a cave tour at Inner Space Cavern. 

I took along a quilt, thinking we'd use it, and gladly left it behind when the boys became interested in it. This is the Color Block Postage Stamp quilt I finished last year (one of many pandemic makes). 

It's now being happily used as it should! 

The only quilt-y stuff happened while riding in the car. It's a long drive to Texas and back, so you'd think I could accomplish more than this. But I've found these EPP blocks are slow to come together.

Now that we're at home, I'm keeping busy with another grandson. On our return trip from Texas, we stopped in Lafayette, Louisiana for a meet-up with our daughter who passed along 10 year-old Aesa for a visit. His older brother stayed with us in June. 

Due to rain, we've only managed to get out for a couple golf cart trips, and to play boccé ball.

Unfortunately, we're staying indoors more than we'd planned, and have already played a lot of Rummikub.

Aesa wanted to know about my peg loom, and then was even more excited about the notion of sewing on my little Janome Derby machine. He sewed together, end-to-end, ¾-inch wide fabric selvedges from my bag of unprinted selvedges.

Now he's weaving the sewn-together strips onto the peg loom. 

He wants to make this into a pouch.

Then he wanted to sew fabric, so I pulled out charm packs that he arranged on the design wall and pieced into an 8" X 10" top that also needs finishing. I've reminded him that we have two projects to complete before he returns home.

Multiple projects. Isn't that typical of a creative sort? 😁

Wednesday morning at 10 AM, just as directed by the MQG, I got online to register for QuiltCon 2022, February 17-20, in Phoenix. I had my list of eight lectures and two workshops selected and identified for registration.

Disappointingly, online registration was horrible - the worst it's ever been! The system operated so slowly that it took five or more minutes to move through each click in the process. Finally, more than an hour later, when I went to check out, payment was stopped because one of the workshops was full. Before I could process payment for everything else, I had to remove the sold-out workshop from my cart - another long wait! Good grief. I was at my computer until 11:30 AM, intermittently texting with other quilt-friends who were attempting the same thing. It took 90 minutes to complete registration! This sure makes me sympathetic toward quilters who work and have limited time to spend doing this. 

So, I got into all eight lectures (getting into lectures is never a problem conference halls hold hundreds of people) and one workshop - "Piecing with Templates" with Melissa de Leon Mason. I'm on a waitlist for "Matchstick Quilting" with Cassandra Beaver, though I'm not hopeful about getting into it.

Book Recommendation

The Horse Dancer, by Jojo Moyes (the same person who wrote Me Before You) was written in 2017 and I wish I'd known about it sooner. What a great book! Though some of the online reviews of it are negative, I'm putting it among my "top ten" 2021 reads. 

Fourteen year-old Sarah lives with her grandfather, a former member of an elite French cavalry - Le Cadre Noir. Since giving Sarah a colt to raise, their lives have purpose as Sarah learns to care for and train her horse, Boo.

Natasha is an attorney, and Mac is a professional photographer; their marriage is falling apart. Just as their lives are going different directions, they find themselves forced together when Natasha meets Sarah. No one is being honest; they're each pretending that all is well. Until honesty prevails, they're headed toward unhappiness. Eventually, each of them will be changed in ways that none of them could have imagined. 

Though I don't know anything about horses, nor am I familiar with the skill of dressage (I wish I had seen that event in the recent Tokyo Olympics!), I was completely entralled with this relationship between a girl and her horse. Several times I was moved to tears. My only minor complaint is that when French is spoken, it isn't interpreted into English. As a French language enthusiast, I understood most of what was said, but would have appreciated a few clarifications. 

Linda's score: 4.8/5.0 

Linda