The Flowers Are Taking Shape

I've made some more progress on my latest project - a couple more leaves and stems to complete and then it's on to the "Renegade Thread Play" . . . Not sure what happened with the rest of the weekend. Beautiful spring weather - we made a trip up to Daffodil Hill today to join our gourmet camping group on a picnic. Wonderful drive with great views, some creative inspirations and precious time with my hubby! More later . . .

Why Didn’t I Ever Take An Art Class in High School or College?

I took an interesting class today – “Fusible Flowers: Cone Flowers” at the Quilters Corner. The class taught us Melinda Bula’s flower technique which involves building the flower in layers of fabrics and then adding sparkle with her "Renegade Thread play". Basically a paint-by-number technique. It’s kind of funny – I had obtained this book about a year ago about making “Cutting Garden Quilts” and the book contained fabulous pictures of these flowers made with all these bits of fabric. Being a new quilter I thought “someday I’d like to explore this further”. More recently I noticed this particular class was being taught and I thought it sounded similar to what was featured in this book. Turns out that the book was written by the instructor of the class, Melinda Bula – what a great surprise that was!

The picture shows my flowers in their early stage – I have a lot more cutting of fabrics to do. Perhaps I’ll document my progress on this blog as time goes on. Melinda taught us to conquer our fears and to know that something “doesn’t have to be perfect, just pretty.” She was a great teacher and such an inspiration. Onward to new adventures . . .

Spring is in the Air – it’s time to start Gardening

It’s been so beautiful the last few days, the tulips and freesia are starting to bloom, the leaves on the rose bushes are lush, the beloved forget-me-not blossoms are beginning to emerge, and I’m aching to get out to the raised beds and prepare them for the Spring and Summer.

We decided to not grow a bunch of veggies this year because we now have a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) membership with SoilBorn Farms (http://www.soilborn.org/) here in Sacramento. We’ve been on their waiting list and just received word that we’re in! Each week we will pick up a box of assorted vegetables and we are looking forward to trying new things and “eating close to the source”. Just yesterday two books I had recently ordered arrived in the mail – “Slow Food Nation's – Come To The Table” and the Alice Waters cookbook “The Art of Simple Food”. We are totally on board with adopting the philosophy of eating food that can be traced to its source and that is produced without chemical and/or industrial processes. We now have a couple of Alice Waters' cookbooks and instead of just reading the recipes we are going to actually cook some of them (and be sure to make a visit to her Café in Berkeley). So, the raised beds will contain more herbs, flowers and probably just some tomato plants. We have a threat of rain this weekend yet I’m hoping to get out into the dirt and get my hands dirty.

Some Ideals To Strive Towards

Eat locally & sustainably

Eat seasonally

Shop at farmers’ markets

Plant a garden

Conserve, compost & recycle

Cook simply

Valori Wells Giveaway - What A Way To Start A Creative Day

My blog giveaway gift from Valori Wells arrived in the mail today. I've been following her blog for close to a year now and from time to time she has a giveaway - her latest was in honor of her 100th blog. And I was one of the lucky recipients. Some fun spring colors - hmm . . . what will I use them for?Today also included pinning my next quilt which, incidently, is made up of Valori's fabrics from her Olive Rose collection. This will be our camping and picnic quilt. I'm also going to experiment, for the first time, on the free motion quilting skills I recently learned in a class. Until now I've just been doing the stitch in the ditch and straight lines type of quilting.

I used some of the blues and greens from Valori's Urban Flannel collection as the back of a quilt I finished recently for Lesley. I like it a lot and the quilt turned out to be double-sided . . . either side makes a great top!

Valori's blog can be found at http://valoriwells.typepad.com/

Have fun with her creative and inspiring work.

Thinking About Blogging Instead Of Actually Blogging

I found this cute little journal to jot down ideas of topics to blog about . . . it may be as far as I get today in actually writing something . . .