Progress

As much as I didn't enjoy the onslaught of a cold, the benefit to feeling lousy on Sunday was that I spent most of the day working on the quilt I've vowed to finish this month. And for the first time, it seems possible to finish it! I've been a little frustrated with myself for all that I seem to have forgotten during my long quilt-making hiatus -- all those little tricks that are second nature when you're deep into a craft that make life so much easier are the things that, for me anyway, make me slap my forehead and roll my eyes at myself as I stumble along re-learning. The delightful Heather Bailey has a great quilt binding tutorial on her site that's helped me remember the right way to attach a binding, so I've figured out why my recent mini-quilt bindings have been bothering me. Oh, hurray again for crafty bloggers!

This blindingly red fabric swatch picture does not remotely represent the true color of this fabric -- it's a rich, deep magenta -- but reds are particularly difficult to reproduce electronically. It's a small piece -- 7" x 9" or so -- that I bought in 1980 in Paris. At that time it was nearly impossible to find quilting materials in Europe (or at least it was for me, as a traveling college grad who didn't speak anything other than English and a little German) and the few things I did find were way beyond my backpacking budget. This is one of my rare purchases, from a place that I believe at the time was quite well-known for home decorating fabrics. I think I'm going to work it into the center of a mini-quilt to keep for myself, even though the design doesn't lend itself to that -- I just don't want to lose it, or have someone someday just toss it out simply because I couldn't bring myself to cut it or make use of it elsewhere. It reminds me of all the quilts I still need to label....