Life is So Full

Life is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. - Robert Louis Stevenson

 

I'm a happy king queen, continuing to leap-frog through my she cave

It's the home stretch on the "All Dressed Up" mini quilt I'm making from Kelly Young's My Quilt Infatuation new book Scrappy Improv Quilting. I've been asked not to share all of the project until my October 18 reveal day, but I'll tell you that I enjoyed quilting it. I haven't quilted free motion hooked swirls in a long time, and - as I am doing more often these days - I added some big stitch quilting. 

For week four of the QuiltFortCo Finger Paints QAL, these are blocks 4 and 5. 

Thus far, here's how it looks. I like it more and more.

Curated Quilts asked quilters to make and mail them a 5½" X 10½" block for the Harmony Quilt they plan to feature in their "Collaboration" issue, and display at QuiltCon. This is my contribution, made with a Guicy Guice print.

A Jacksonville (Florida) friend, Paula @sewmodernchicky has an online quilt shop (she has also been a Marketplace vendor for Quilting Guild of The Villages). When she recently had a sale on wide backs for $9 a yard, I picked up a couple, and a few sale prints. I've always liked Anna Maria Horner's "Echinea" print and managed to buy-out two of her remaining color ways. I'm thinking "purse." That palm print might make into a nice shirt too.

This tired-looking jelly roll has been in my possession since 2009, when it was given to me by a quilt-y friend, Di B., who lives in Sydney, Australia. She gifted it as a souvenir of six weeks I spent in Sydney, teaching beginner quiltmaking to a group at her church, St. Mark's Anglican Church. The fabrics are all Australia prints. 

Truth told, I've never bought a jelly roll because the prints are often overly-matched. But when Big Cypress Quilters (my every Tuesday quilting group) announced that this Tuesday - this afternoon! - would be Jelly Roll Race Day, and having never participated in a jelly roll race, I remembered this jelly roll. 

We were instructed to watch a Missouri Star YouTube video to see how to make a jelly roll quilt, and told to join our strips together before the Tuesday meeting. 

I'm all set to go, with pressed-open seams and miles of strips ready to join.

I'm almost embarrassed to post the two pictures below, but this is the best I could do with my Canon point-and-shoot camera.

Last Wednesday evening shortly after 8 pm, after watching on TV the countdown for the Cape Canaveral launch of Inspiration4, we rushed outside to watch, from 109 miles away, the rocket's progress across the night sky. 

Inspiration4 is a SpaceEx capsule that sent four civilian astronauts into space. It was pretty exciting to watch! This is one of the booster separations.

I paid the price for being outdoors for five or six minutes though! Mosquitos love me. Eleven mosquito bites, some of which swelled to two inches in diameter, as well as itching like crazy. I hope every mosquito that bit me died a horrible death from my drug-thinned (Plavix and Xarelto) blood!

I recently had a check-up for P.A.D. (peripheral artery disease - for me, it's a genetic condition caused by blood with too much plaque in it) that has been problematic in my legs. In addition to blood-thinning drugs and cholesterol med, my doc continues to recommend rigorous exercise to keep the blood pumping and arteries open. Besides Walk Away the Pounds and line dancing, I power-walk twice a week.

When walking, I use a Map My Walk phone app to track distance, speed and elevation. Below is the route of my last 4.22 mile walk, for 1 hour/8 minutes, at a rate of 16:18 per mile. (It's always audiobook listening time for me!) I like seeing where I've been, and have even seen pictures of a specific route a walker or jogger has taken, so their course spells out a word! How about my cute little cul de sacs? Inspiration for a quilt?!

Book Recommendations 

The Forgotten Letters of Esther Durrant by Kayte Nunn is a nicely-written book about Esther, a young wife and mother in the 1930s, suffering from postpartum depression. Her husband sends her to a Scilly island (off the UK) mental institute. Though initially she resists, the doctor's gentle kindness, and the therapeutic lifestyle of seven people living on an island, begin to work wonders. Tragedy changes that. 

In 2018, Rachel takes a position in the Scilly Islands as a marine scientist, studying the life patterns of clams. A rough storm finds her near a tiny island where she's rescued by a woman who lives there alone. While waiting for the weekly supply boat to return her to her home base, Rachel spends five days making discoveries about the island. Hidden in a suitcase, she finds letters written to "E" from "R." Rachel needs to find out who they are, and how their love story ended. 

Linda's score: 3.6/5.0

In The Therapist, by B.A. Paris, Alice and Leo have decided to move in together. They find a condo in The Circle, a gated area of 12 homes, in London. Alice can't figure out why some of the neighbors are whispering, and excluding her from their get-togethers. Deciding to make friends, Alice invites everyone for an evening of drinks. When an uninvited guest shows up, and it seems that Alice is the only one who meets him, she determines to find out who he is.

Still, a few women seem stand-off-ish. When Alice learns that something happened in her house, her world turns upside down, and her relationship with Leo changes. Determined to get to the truth, she questions everyone, suspects everyone, and unknowingly puts herself at risk. 

Linda's score: 3.9/5.0

I have fond memories of watching my dad make ham salad. He clamped a heavy, cast iron meat grinder to the kitchen table, and cranked it out using bologna. Not having eaten it in ages, we decided to make it, and bought a one-pound hunk of "German bologna" from the Publix deli. To make it into ham salad, we've determined that bologna magically turns into ham as it goes through the meat grinder! It was delicious! 

We're living and eating like a King and Queen! Linda