Books

 Good morning, all. It's just after 8:30 in the morning and I have been up for about half an hour. Sounds like I got a good night's sleep, but actually I was up in the night for about three and a half hours. Oh well. I still slept very soundly when I was asleep. I woke from a dream in which I was walking a mountain trail with a young woman. The trail narrowed and was bordered on one side sometimes by a sheer drop off into a ravine in which I could see the tops of trees and sometimes into a body of water which looked as it also dropped off very quickly quite near the trail. 

What does that dream mean, I wonder.

Yesterday was an interesting day. Dave spent most of the morning and early afternoon doing yard work. He cleared out the raised garden beds and cleared up the overgrown vegetation on the patio. Then he bagged everything up in four huge, black contractor bags and hopefully it will be taken away with today's garbage. 

I spent the morning inside, sewing. I'm working on my disharmonious color quilt. So far it's turning into a medallion quilt. I've been picking colors with Dave's help. I started with orange and purple and sewed a center improv pieced medallion. Dave picked magenta and green and I sewed a ruler-free piano border for that. I had enough fabric to go around the center medallion one-and-a-half times. Then together we picked out a blue and yellow combination that will be my next round. I'm getting to the point where I'm going to have to quilt at least part of it so I can start putting it together.

My grandmother quilt is on hold until I get some fabrics I ordered at the beginning of the month, custom printed from an online service.

Oh, and we also got three packages yesterday: My new egg tempura medium, a shipment of things from Target, and a package of sale books from the American Quilting Society. Their sale books were too cheap to pass up at $3 to $7 dollars. (I checked the titles I was interested in and they were going for $18 to $25 each on Amazon, which is a rip because the books I ordered were probably remaindered, but Amazon never sells remaindered books as far as I can tell.) Anyway, I ordered: 

Liberated Medallion Quilting by Gwen Marston

Quick Colorful Quilts: Beginning with Embellishment by Rosemary Wilkinson

Simple Contemporary Quilts by Valerie Van Arsdale Shrader

Fresh Perspectives: Reinventing 18 Classic Quilts form the International Quilt Study Center and Museum by Carol Gilham Jones and Bobbi Finley

Quilt Lab: The Creative Side of Science by Alexandra Winston

Fast, Fun, & Easy Scrapbook Quilts by Sue Astroth

Art and Inspirations: Yvonne Porcella

Lots of new reading and (let's face it, mostly) picture examining to do in these books. 

I've already looked through the Gwen Marston book, but only very briefly. I am going to go through it more carefully as I fashion my own medallion quilt, of course. 

After we brought our packages in, Dave and I had showers and then we made dinner: A gobi-channa masala concoction and mattar paneer. It was tasty, but I put far, far too much turmeric in the gobi, so today I'll add some ginger and tomato to the leftovers to try to balance it out. 

After dinner, I watched a few youtube videos and read a bit. (Still on Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, with a bunch of her short fiction queued up for when I'm finished with this novel.)

This morning though: More coffee. Breakfast. Going through my new books. Sewing. Yes, just moving forward into spring.