QAL, 30 Days of Improv

Continuing to work on my "Summer Camp Modern Mystery Quiltalong," led by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr, the husband and wife team of @modernquiltstudio, I put my completed quilt top on-point (the layout I chose), trimmed the sides and did a "victory lap" (so-called by Christa Watson) of straight stay-stitching around the perimeter because the edges are all bias. Ugh. I'm not particularly pleased with the way I trimmed it because the top is not on-the-square. After quilting, I'll have some pretty challenging squaring-up to do.

A couple days ago, Weeks and Bill posted this to Instagram and I found it thought-provoking. It lists six steps in the emotional process of a creator. For me, this pretty-much spells out my typical responses to creating improvisationally. Does this resonate with you too? 

What it comes down to is perseverance. Keep going, even when you hit a roadblock.

Speaking of improv... I've completed my first week of #30daysofimprovqal with Shannon and Amanda.

Though this week's prompt was "stripes," I haven't neglected the overarching theme: scraps. Not surprisingly, I made larger and more blocks than their suggested guidelines.

Prompts are:

• Week 1 - Stripes/Rectangles
• Week 2 - L shapes
• Week 3 - Triangles
• Week 4 - Curves
• Week 5 - putting it all together

Tuesday evening was the monthly meetings of our local, mostly traditional, quilt guild. I seldom attend but I did this time because our guest speaker was Christa Watson of Las Vegas, Nevada. Christa and I have known one another for about nine years. In 2015, I helped promote her book Machine Quilting With Style by making the "Candy Pop" quilt in the book, and offering a book giveaway on my blog. 

It was nice to see Christa, and again hear about her domestic machine quilting process, much of which is similar to what I teach in my own domestic machine quilting workshops. The event was well-attended by about 250 quilters.

Book Recommendation

It's been decades since I read a Stephen King book, so I thought, "Why not?"

Billy Summers is about Billy Summers whose career has been as a hit man. However, Billy isn't your typical bad guy because he only kills people who are bad - they deserve to be killed.

Billy's career path began when he was a kid, and developed when he became a sharp-shooter during deployments to Afghanistan. Now he has decided that the hit next job will be his last. With a $500,000K down payment, and the promise of $1.5M when the job's done, what does he have to lose? The reader follows Billy through his fake identity as a writer living in a lower middle-class neighborhood where he revives the lawn at his house, and makes friends. After months of planning, including a post-killing escape to yet another fabricated life, his plans are interrupted by a 21 year-old woman whose life he saves. 

While I enjoyed the book, and marvel at Mr. King's thought processes to develop such an intricate chain of events, I did not care for the insertion of his negative presidential jabs that he must assume are held by all his readers. Those ruined the book for me.

Linda's score: 3.5/5.0. 

Quordle and my first-guess word "trial"

Like many of you, ever since Wordle hit cyberspace and achieved instant popularity, I've been playing daily word games on my iPhone.

In addition to Wordle, for the past year I've been also playing Quordle. It's Wordle times four... you simultaneously try to guess four words.

This week I was shocked when the first word I typed, "trial," was correct! On the first guess! It's unlikely this will ever happen to me again, so I had to document it.

I'll add that I don't use the same starting word every day. Though when I can't come up with a word, I fall back on "aisle." 

Linda