It's Not the Heat, It's the Toxicity

 Although the heat is definitely a factor. According to my phone app we're going to hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit today. I'm suspicious of that number as we tend to run a few degrees cooler than Seattle, which is where I believe the predictions originate. Yesterday, for example, it was predicted we would hit 100. To the best of my knowledge we only made it to 97. Don't get me wrong, that's bad enough! Our poor little portable a/c unit had all it could do to keep us twenty degrees cooler inside than out. And that is only in the room in which it sits. My studio space is on the west side of the house and around a corner from the flow of cool air. Needless to say, I haven't been very productive the last couple of days. In perfect honesty however, I believe it was poking my nose outdoors that set me back the most. Air that registers as moderately unhealthy for most people is decidedly unhealthy for me. Or so it would appear from recent experience. I have been fighting a near-migraine for the last 24 hours. If it's not one thing, it's another! 

The tropical Shoo-fly quilt has been bound, laundered, labelled, and sent on its' way.

 The pink binding was the perfect final touch. I don't know how well you'll be able to see it, but James quilted with a variegated thread in an overall swirly design.

 I don't think I could be any happier with this quilt. 😁

Before the heat came on I'd pulled out the parts of a potential quilt I believe I began last summer, thinking I would try to get that built into a lap quilt. 

Kate, at least, will recognize the ship blocks. 😉 I haven't played around with them a lot since then but this is what I hope will be the next completed quilt top. In the meantime, if you are not already aware, those of you who may be receiving notifications of my new posts via Feedburner will have to adapt to the fact that that service is being discontinued. I have added a widget for follow.it, although I don't know how user friendly it may be. Frankly, I haven't had the mental wherewithal to look at all the options for replacing Feedburner. I don't think my readership is high; I only hope those who do visit regularly will find a way to keep in touch. 💜

What A Relief

We've been having true summer heat lately. I used to tolerate it much better than I seem to do now. Plus we now have a neighbor who apparently likes to cook outdoors. That has made the air quality too poor for me to open the windows to relieve the heat in the house. We've had to run our portable air conditioner earlier and longer than in previous years. Husband is looking into more efficient ways to cool our home. It's also been a while since we've had any appreciable precipitation. But this morning we woke up to rain and cooler temperatures. Hurray! On top of that, I felt better physically today than I have in days. There'd be no better opportunity to put bindings on quilts so that's what I did today. 😁

The red and white quilt in the middle of the stack did not get its' binding today but the other two did. Here's a detail shot of the quilting on the quilt at the bottom of the stack. 

I tried to get a shot of the quilting on the Halloween quilt too but I'm afraid it's pretty hard to discern. That's a Disappearing 9 Patch quilt. I had James quilt the "sashing" so the novelty prints would stand out. It will be interesting to see how it looks after it's been laundered. 

As you can see, I figured out how to get pictures to load again. Turns out all I needed to do was clear my computer's cache. Next up will be to figure out how to get the pictures where I want them in the blog post more easily. 😒

 

Transitions

This notice showed up when I was reading through the comments left on my blog recently:

Following the announcement of Google+ API deprecation scheduled for March 2019, a number of changes will be made to Blogger’s Google+ integration on 4 February 2019. 

Google+ Comments: Support for Google+ comments will be turned down, and all blogs using Google+ comments will be reverted back to using Blogger comments. Unfortunately, comments posted as Google+ comments cannot be migrated to Blogger and will no longer appear on your blog. 

I never took full advantage of Google+ on my blog so I don't know how this may affect any of my readers. What I do know is that none of the Blogspot blogs I've subscribed to have been showing up in my Inbox. I assume that is connected with the changes that are being made in some way. I can only hope that will be corrected soon. 

I only use technology because I have to in order to stay in touch with the quilting/needlework world. Mostly I find it  confusing and overwhelming. Please bear with me as I try to cope with things out of my control. 

Studio Companions

For Mother's Day this year I was given a new laptop. I needed one, and for the most part I'm happy with my new little buddy. However, in their infinite wisdom Google has seen fit to discontinue supporting Picasa, the photo management system I've been using. Which means I now have to find, install, and learn a new program. {sigh} We've tried one already. No, two actually. Three if you count the one that came with the computer (useless, at least for my purposes). I may have to go back to using the more professional program my photographer husband uses. Anyone out there have any suggestions or recommendations?

I don't use a smart phone - or any phone - to take pictures. I use a small Canon digital camera. Aside from the rare family event most of the pictures I take are for this blog. This computer is loaded with Windows 10 (of course, since it's a pc). I want something simple and straightforward. Does that even exist in this world?

Now let's see if I can find any textile content I can share with you...

Lots of textiles waiting to be put to good use!

Hmm, not so much. I don't believe I have introduced you to my new studio bird though. When the lovely Mr. Bingley passed away I didn't let any grass grow under my feet in my search for a new singing companion. Unfortunately there were no yellow canaries to be had in my part of the country at the time.

Do you know how hard it is to get a picture of a nervous bird?!

But! There's a guy in our church who breeds red factor canaries. He had some lovely little guys available for me to choose from. It wasn't an easy decision, but I brought one home and eventually christened him Pippen. Here you can see his pretty red chest:

And here's his back.

I was told this color variant is called black opal because there's a black gene in the pool. Lon had one bird that was a very striking black with red patches. Most display shades of gray and white mixed in with red  and brown bits. Pippen is not as flashy as Mr. Bingley, and he sings a slightly different song, but I'm still delighted to have his presence in my studio.

If we can figure out a new photo program I will have an embroidery project to share with you for the next installment of the Stitch Along on 22 May. No, I didn't finish the needlepoint I've been working on (silly goose!). I started a new project this week. ;- )

No Customer Service

It's been almost a week now and I still have not been able to resolve my picture posting issue. I've tried everything I can think of, including leaving messages on Blogger's Help Forum. That's one "service" I find absolutely useless. It's like throwing your concern into the ether and hoping someone will happen along to grab it up and address it. Is there not one employee assigned to monitor the new postings there? If not, there should be. I miss old fashioned customer service. A lot of online retailers will answer questions over the phone; I appreciate that a lot. I guess maybe because Blogger is a free product I shouldn't expect excellent customer support.

Since my last post with pictures I have finished the Churn Dash quilt that's headed to the BASICS Housing program in New York. It turned out really well. Too bad you can't see it. (Hmm. Guess I could upload pictures to Flickr. I've just fallen out of the habit of using Flickr since I've been blogging.)

I've also finished an ATC for October. It's really cool. Maybe you'll get to see it someday. Right now my nose is so out of joint I just need to get off the computer and stitch out my frustrations...

No Pictures

And what's a quilty post without pictures?

I don't know what the problem is. I've tried only loading one photo at a time and the process still is so slow the photo won't load. Is the internet that busy?

My pictures are not large files.

Very frustrating. Plus I see that, whether we like it or not, everyone on Blogger will be transferred to the new interface eventually. Guess us old folks just have to move forward with everyone else. There may be more of us in number but the young people rule cyberspace.

Makes one think twice about continuing to blog at all...

A Finish and A Question

Woohoo! The binding on the Lincoln Logs quilt is all sewn down. I even slept under the quilt last night. Slept real well too. :- )

The official title for this quilt will be "The Comfort of Friends" because most of the blocks were made at my request by members of my quilt guild. And because it's tied, technically it's a comforter, not a quilt. But I'm trying to get beyond those technicalities.

Why is it, I'd like to know, that I can find more threads that need to be cut and removed after I've photographed the quilt than before? I had to re-take this picture about three times and there's still a thread on one of the blocks!

Before I fell asleep under my newly finished quit last night I got to thinking about the fact that I rarely label my quilts. I sign them, but I don't label them. The thought of trying to put all the pertinent information about the origins of the quilt on a label just makes me shudder. But I think it's important that that information be recorded somewhere.

Sure, it's all in my studio notebooks and project notebooks, but I'm the only one who could decipher those notes and scribbles. Even I can't figure it out sometimes. And then what about the quilts I've not made but have inherited or collected in some other way?

I've written the history of the oldest quilt in my possession but I have several other quilts and tops that my kids might want to know about some day. So now I'm thinking about creating a new book or journal. One in which I can record the story of how each quilt came to be or how it came to be in my possession. I know there are blank quilt journals on the market but I think I'm going to want to create my own. I think it's going to be an actual book too, not merely a spreadsheet in the computer. The question is how to build it. What format, what information, how will I add to it as I make or acquire more quilts?

I welcome any suggestions you may have.

Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative

A few posts ago I showed you the focal patch I was planning to use for my contribution to Tonya's Priority Hope Challenge. Yesterday I was finally able to take up needle and thread (or sewing machine in this case) and get some work done. Hurray!

In case you hadn't noticed, I don't enjoy not being productive in one way or another. If I'm not working on something, somehow, I am not a happy camper. And when my body or the changing seasons or other factors out of my control interfere with my ability to make things... well, it's not pretty, as evidenced by the last week.

Anywhoo, I got out some additional prints and free-pieced a 3 inch heart that I subsequently turned into a flower head. Two sizes of rick rack became the stem for the flower, and sequin hearts became leaves.


I embellished the centers of the flowers in the focal print with some tee-tiny ribbon yo-yos and added a few button flowers as well. Used up a skein of black embroidery floss quilting the background (which you may or may not be able to see in the picture). I think I may have one more embellishment to put on before I back and bind it.


Nearly all of the other quilts that have been made as part of this challenge have featured Tonya's free-pieced word 'Hope.' What can I say? I just had to do my own thing. I hope someone out there appreciates my folk art style and will bid on and buy the quilt. It does have the bird image Tonya asked for, even if you don't notice it at first. (Although it shows up really well in these pictures!) I'm playing with titles that incorporate the word hope too.

This quilt will be dedicated to my mother-in-law. She loved music and gardening along with a host of other activities. Alzheimer's has taken away nearly everything except her love of music at this point. I'm told she sits in her chair and directs music only she can hear. The irony of her condition is that she and my father-in-law nursed two of their parents through Alzheimer's as well. {sigh}

On a technical note: Sharon of Indigo Threads discovered that there's a bug in Blogger that eliminates your ability to enlarge the pictures once the photo has been moved on the page. Apparently you can move text without affecting the photos, but not the pictures themselves. If that is the case, you guys are probably out of luck here. I tend to upload my photos first because they are the inspiration for my posts. Once I have the words written I rearrange the pictures as seems appropriate. I will, however, try to be more mindful when I have big quilts that you might want to get a closer look at.