I drove from Georgetown, TX, to El Dorado today. I nice, fast uneventful drive. The speed limit for much of the trip was 75 mph. I know I shouldn't love that, but I do. I was born with a lead foot.

Once in El Dorado I checked in with the lovely ladies in the guild who were setting up their quilt show and then I avoided working on read work yet again. I shopped a litte and bought a scarf, as if I need another one. But I forgot to pack a scarg and this one is a great shade of blue and my neck was cold – and only $14!

I walked and looked at cool stuff and took photos. I drove past and then walked back to the police station because I like the look of this brick border at the top of the building:

The green in the windows against the red of the bricks is very nice as well. 

There was this old doorway…

You know, the blue-gray in the window in this photo is also very nice. I noticed as I walked that I was way more attracted to the old, beat-up facades. I'm also finding myself more and more attracted by words and letters. If only I could have gotten up in the air about 20' – this would have been a much better photo. 

The electric boxes are on the way to the entrance to my room in the B&B (which is very nice!) I just like the arrangement of the different sizes of boxes. 

Last but not least, the ironwork on this bench is also good. Why? I see a suggestion for a machine quilting pattern: vertical rows, one with a linear pattern alternating with a more organic design. Neither row of designs must be precise… the designs can be a little organic which lends itself to free-motion quilting. Fun, don't you think?

I also posted some other images to facebook and instagram and twitter that aren't in this post. If you happen to be on any of those social media sites, please do follow me. Or don't because goodness knows I understand anyone who prefers to use their time in other ways :-).

If you want to find me elsewhere, go to www.pieceocake.com, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the appropriate links. Now I'm off to dinner – Mexican food – yay!

I'm on the road, tonight in Waco, TX. Tomorrow I drive to El Dorado, AR. I did a little surfing and ran across a couple of interesting tidbits.

You may know that I am married to a scientist who has spent his professional life teaching college students science. My youngest son is biostatistician involved in research. What they study does not necessarily make sense to the average individual but it matters. Learning about things because they are interesting matters because you just never know where research may lead.

If you have read/heard about the folly of research into duck genetalia (apparently a topic in some news circles right now) you ought to also read this short explanation from the lead scientist in the duck genetalia research. Click here.

As it turns out, duck parts are both weird and interesting. See that dangly, pink, corscrew-looking thing? That's the duck's penis! I, for one, am happy that people genetalia is not like a duck's.

And as long as you are reading about stuff most people ignore, check out this review of Gulp. Yet another book I want to find time to read. I still want to read Stiff.

I gave a lecture on quilting to a lovely group of quilters this morning – it was fun! Then lunch, and then I did a little more shopping. I just could not help myself!

Georgetown is in a warmer part of Texas and I was hunting sandals with arch support. I figured this was a good place to do it. Finding arch support in a sandal is a hard but I did at Judith's! Here's the black pair I bought (so much better than my black 'dress' Reef flipflops). This sandal is kind of funky and 'rumpled' looking but they feel so good and should dress up or down.

And I found a sort of silver pair…

These are not cheap sandals but I expect to wear them for several years. I can't stand up in those cute, cheap, flat sandals and seriously, a woman needs sandals that look good with a skirt or dress. I'm tired of being embarrassed by my feet in the summer. It would have been fun to find colored sandals but surely these will suffice.

I got back to the hotel room and continued to avoid writing on the new book. I just couldn't concentrate in this hotel room. Some hotels feel like work, this one does not. So I surfed the web and found this very interesting article on garbage collectors in NYC. If you squinched up your nose and immediately thought 'why would I read that?' – this article is something you should read. It's good to have a little insight into the jobs done by those people who do hard and invisble jobs.

And then there's this happy video that my friend, Laurie, shared with me. Public School 22 is in Staten Island and while the kids change, the chorus remains. The director of the PS22 Chorus is Gregg Breinberg. The PS22 Chorus is famous – except that I'd never heard of them before and maybe you haven't either. This video will make you smile. If you want to look, there are others online.

Fun! Tomorrow I teach applique and then begin the drive north and east to El Dorado, AR. Thankfully there won't be time to shop. This is good. I'm supposed to be making, not spending.

And what I mean by that is celebrating the fact that we are not as young as we used to be. At least I'm not.

I'm on the road – currently in Georgetown, TX. I'll be teaching for the next couple of days and then it's on to El Dorado, AR. I had some time to shop a little this afternoon. I was hunting a Sephora and found one insdie JC Penney. Amazingly enough, the shopping was excellent! I found some good deals on summer items and the eye shadow I was after. Time well-spent. 

But back to my main topic: I thought about age-appropriateness as I tried on shorts. I believe that just because it fits and you might have decent legs, there is an age after which short shorts are just wrong. So, I put them back and I was OK with that. 

When I got back to the hotel and checked my email, I found a link to this article/story from NPR. It's about Ari Seth Cohen, a 31-year-old photographer/blogger who takes photos (with permission and some discussion) of older fashionable ladies who are out and about on the streets of NY. Really – read the article. It will make you smile. Look at his blog, Advanced Style. I've added a link to it in my blog list at right so that I can easily find it again (and you can too).

I love this blog! I love to take photos of interesting looking people. People are just great to look at. Here's an Advanced Style video, with Tziporah and Debra, two of Ari's models.

I will never be this interesting in clothes, but I appreciate the attitude!

I've been considering the pile of ugly fabrics and how to make them happy together. These are scraps so, of course, a scrap quilt came to mind. The problem was how to combine them. 

I think the most successful scrap quilts are made from a simple two 'something' combination. One color/value playing against (or with) another color/value. I sometimes use a more complicated system when I am working with fabrics of my own choosing but the ugly fabric challenge is not that. These pieces of fabric are all over the map and they don't really like each other. What to do?

I decided to treat everything ugly as one half of my 'system'. I set them against white. White is clean and clear and lighter than everything else in the pile. Ugly = darker, white = light.

I decided to keep the design simple, using only 2" half square triangles (HSTs). I found a dandy tool for making the triangles and I'll share that with you in a later post.

I decided to try 3 different settings. Initially I placed the HSTs on the wall in three different patterns, paying no attention to the color of the ugly fabrics involved:

Not perfect (practically awful), but the third set is easier to look at. However, I'd like the finished quilt to be better than 'easy to look at' so I decided to try grouping like colors together…

In all of these settings, adding order to the chaos makes the pattern hold together better. Each one is more pleasing to the eye that it was before. I still prefer the 3rd set and that's how I will proceed. I have a lot of HST to sew together. I think it would be fun to applique circles or yoyos inside the white squares – and if I have time, I might do that.

Some time back Dianne, a faithful reader, asked me to talk more about clear vs. gray colors. This is a good time to do that. If you look at the set above, can you tell what's clear and what's gray? I'll bet you can but just so there's no mistake, the orange in the lower right corner is very clear – and there are other clear colors in the block.

There are some very gray fabrics. The one that sticks out the most to me is the upper right corner HST found in the lower left block, above. It's a purplish-gray-burgundy and it sort of looks like mud. Contrast that with the pink diagonally across from it. Gray vs clear. Something else you might notice is the clear colors come forward in space, gray colors recede or push farther away from you. You can use this in your quilts to imply dimension.

Most of the other fabrics lean either clear or gray in varying degrees. Often the clarity of a color depends on what it is next to. Value, too, is determined by what other values are nearby. Dianne (and anyone else who was curious), I hope that helps!

I do not watch basketball and March Madness makes me yawn. However, this is too good to not share.

You can vote on the daily match-up here. Today I chose Princess Leia over Padme Amidala. Duh.

The Star Wars creators are very good at keeping the story alive. I saw the first movies when they were new. Our boys grew up on the videos and can recite a lot of the dialog (as can Steve and I). And now the grandkids are into Star Wars. Jack especially likes the new, animated stories. The boy is so into Star Wars Legos that buying him something new is hard – he has everything already. Good thing they keep making more. I don't begrudge the money I spend on this stuff – it's good fun!