Got a new book...

I'm a sucker for buying books online. I found the most recent one on a quilting website; it's called Enduring Grace and it's about the Shelburne Museum Collection founded by Electra Webb in Vermont. She was a collector of Early American quilts but enlarged the collection into all things early American including 9 houses which she had taken apart and reconstructed on her 8 acre parcel. Each house contains a part of her collection. The website indicates that the museum has been enlarged even more since the book was written. To me, that sounds like a trip I would like to take... to see a museum that large... and full of memorabilia going back to the start of the country.

At the same time, I could visit the Bennington Museum in Vermont that holds the beautiful Dear Jane quilt of which I made a replica. It has the largest collection of Grandma Moses paintings. I would be in heaven - quilts and paintings!

I saw Milk today with Sean Penn as Harvey Milk. What an era the '70s were... and what a fight gay people had to ensure they had the same rights as all other Americans. Penn was excellent as Milk and I will now be rooting for him to win the Academy Award. I lived in the San Francisco area in the late '60s and there was a hippy movement happening at that time. When the gay movement started there, I was back in Los Angeles but I remember all that happened very well. Who could forget the Twinkie Defense that Dan White, the murderer, put up. I wasn't unhappy when he committed suicide years later. Enough of the movie reviews but I heard about two more good movies that I would like to see... The Namesake and The Visitor and I'll be seeing those in the next few days. Don't know that I will review them here, though. I have yet to see Frost/Nixon which I really want to see because I like Frank Langella... who knows, maybe I'll change my Oscar favorite pick after seeing it.

My new quilt is not coming along. I'm so bad at choosing fabrics and though my local quilt shop helped me, I still am not crazy about putting yellow in that quilt. In the first two pictures, I am trying to see if a bright green or the purple paisley might look good with the blue and red of the feathers that go around the stars... but I'm not crazy about either one of them.

I want green, but a light lime green! So I ordered fabric online and I'm waiting for it to get here before I complete that part of the block that I'm supposed to have finished for January.

Oh well, I've got some of it paper-pieced.... boring! I had to stop cutting out all the little pieces and just start sewing.... I like to just hack off a piece of fabric and sew it on, then cut off what I don't need... it's faster. I really dislike precutting but I'll probably do some precutting and some hacking. I hope this quilt turns out looking all right. I'm a little worried about it. Here's one reason.....






At least the top of the Depression quilt is now ready for sandwiching. I'll get around to that in the next few days while I'm waiting for that new fabric to show up.







Oh, and I started my new Anita Brookner novel... Hotel du Lac. The last one - The Bay of Angels - was exquisite in its' simplicity; she writes as if she knows you will understand the character without over explaining. I wish I could write like that.

Depression!?

Sewing this Depression quilt that I've been working on, since completing the top of my Dear Jane, is making me depressed. I find I just don't like doing 'cookie-cutter' quilts. It looks okay but it's boring me to tears finishing it. One thing I can say is that it will be quilted REALLY quickly so I don't have to look at it any more. Then again, maybe I'll enjoy it once it's done.


This is the quilt I SHOULD be working on.... but I like to finish what I'm working on at the moment before starting something new, so that I don't end up with a closet full of UFO's (unfinished objects). It looked complex enough to make that I won't get bored while putting it together... and it looks nice enough that someone might want it after I'm gone - or even before! Because it's easy to get tired of a quilt when it takes a year or more to complete it. Although I've gotten tired of looking at them after only a month in some cases... see above. ;-)


Our new president has done a marvelous job since taking office. Today, it was announced that the WH computers are six years old... that's older than this computer that I use for frivolous matters, and quite honestly I've been considering updating it. So what the heck were those people in GWB's administration working on if they had clunky computers? And they are MS computers, not Macs.... I know that will be a top priority to get changed... as well it should be.

George Mitchell named Middle East Envoy this morning. Hillary Clinton took over the State Dept this morning and changes are happening quickly. Lots of Clinton appointees are being named... Richard Holbrooke is Special Envoy to pakistan and Afghanistan! He called it a 'daunting' assignment... and it is.

I gotta go shopping for cat food with Laura.