I'm quilting the last big quilt for the Color book. Before I could begin, I had to figure out what pattern to quilt into it. I pinned vinyl over a block and started doodling. First I tried a curvy pattern with some flow. Not a stipple, but something maybe with leaves or curls, or flowers… 

It didn't take long to decide that that was not it. Next I tried vertical lines.

I've used this before to good effect but there is a lot of moving around shapes. That means a lot of sewing over lines of stitching and I didn't really want to do so much of that in this quilt so I started drawing horizontal lines to get me from one spot to another. I didn't love that so much but it did point me in a better direction…

I really like this! It's a kind of squared stipple. I think it looks very 1950's retro which fits nicely with the clock fabric. And it's fast!

I know I do stupid dangerous things and I've gotten hurt because of them. Thankfully, I have lived and learned. But (thanks to Charlotte Warr Andersen) I found this page from Buzzfeed titled '25 Completely Scientific Reasons Why Women Live Longer Than Men". This is just one…

I promise that in my most crazy moments, I would never do this. Or use a tractor and a crane to trim a tall hedge.

I've been trying to come up with an image of objects arranged to represent a color wheel. I've seen color wheels made out of sneakers, flip flops, cocktail umbrellas, hair bows… all very cute. However, I want to make one out of objects that I already I own, which is harder.

So far, I've got this:

I don't arrange flowers well—perhaps this is a similar skill? If I had more time to give it, I'd go out and about to shops and use objects there as props but I really don't have the time it would take. 

I was visiting with a younger friend the other night trying to explain that I have hit an age where I know I will not get to do everything that I would like to do. Even though I hope to live many more years, I am trying to use my days more thoughtfully—less frittering away of time. I do believe that this is not something I'm going to spend any more time on :-).

Yay! It feels nice to mark that off the list.

Oceanic art is that made by native peoples from the Pacific islands, including Hawaii and Easter Island, and Australia. I briefly visited the Oceana room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last week and took this photo of carved sheilds mounted on the ceiling:

And a closer look:

There are some good ideas for quilting patterns!

I’m cleaning up my desktop, filing photos into folders where I hope I can find them again. As I look at images from our trip to NYC, I am struck once again by how different it is from Sherman, TX. This is not the view that Steve and I see on a daily basis and it’s interesting for me to imagine what it would be like to actually live in a city this large, with so very many people. For one thing, I would not take so many pictures :-).

I hoped that I would not look like a tourist but our son, Jeff, assured me that I did not look like I lived there. I watched the other women my age on the streets and he was right… I needed a puffy coat for one thing. And surprising to me, many women wore color—pants, shoes, coats, something more than a colorful scarf. My black coat was warm, but not trendy. That said, I was really happy to be warm!

Below, we are standing here by the fountain at Lincoln Center. Jeff can see a part of this fountain from his apartment which I find to be astonishingly cool!

The closest, best grocery store to the kids is Whole Foods. We have a Whole Foods near us. Well, near by Texas standards; it’s 30 miles down the road. We rarely shop there so walking through this one with Jeff was sort of an adventure. One thing is certain, food costs a lot more in NYC than it does in Sherman. 

As we walked the produce aisles, the blue eggs made me stop to pull out my camera. I’d never seen an egg like that before.

Then I noticed both what kind of egg it was and how much it cost. Really?!

These blue speckled eggs are lovely but is each one so good that a person would spend $30 on it? What kind of person spends $30 on one egg? Does an emu egg taste that much better than a chicken egg?

I will never know because no one in our family would never spend $30 on an egg :-).

OK… now I really need to get back to work!