Birthday

Today is my birthday and I have been celebrating all weekend.

Saturday, we headed an hour North on the bikes into the mountains for lunch.  Perfect temperature, but ominous clouds.

I used the Birthday cash from the younger daughter to add a few fabrics to the stash.  The night before I had realized I had a collection of odd "muddy" batiks that need to be turned into a donation or gift quilt.  I'm not really sure where they came from.  Either they were gifts or those fabrics really are mating when I'm not around.  Found a navy blue that will make a great blender fabric.

The clouds were swirling in atypical directions.  We decided to take a chance and ride back the "fun way" through Lowman and Idaho City.  Miles and miles  (about 80) of slow, winding mountain roads. We got lucky and only had a few sprinkles of rain.

Taking the long way home meant that we wouldn't be home in time to watch what had potential to be a history making horse race.  Triple Crown and libation as a rest stop.

Final edits and border added to the Pickle Dish quilt when I got home.

Remember the boys your mom warned you about?  Yeah, that's who I was hanging out with on Sunday.  Lunch ride with the motorcycle club.

This morning, my actual birthday, I had planned to sleep in but my bladder had other plans.

So I started by tidying up the sewing room.  This created new distractions.  I discovered that I had an entire drawer (bottom) of fabrics that I no longer love.  They are older prints, some of which I have discovered the hard way fade easily.  Others were gifts.  Some scraps.  And a lot of dark pink that used to be curtains.  The more I cleaned, the more similar fabric I found.

I had read an article earlier this morning  on The Root Connection regarding a Gee's Bend inspired quilt workshop that Sujata had been teaching.  As y'all know, scrap quilts make me anxious.  And I'm only good with random to a point. But I am good with spontanious.  So I decided that random with rules was OK for me.  The starting master plan was pink and green, substituting orange for pink and blue for green from time to time.

Tearing random sized strips was very theraputic.

 This was the view as I left for lunch with my sweetie.  Kind of looks like a fabric store barfed on the floor.

It turns out that I can't truely do random / free form.  About 9", I had to square up the  inside angles so I could figure out how wonky everything else was turning out.  The last pink round in this photo, I used to try to square up the blocks to any random size, just square.  A few were just too far off, so the 3 with the blue outsides were my next round efforts to square up.  These are at 15".

Posting these photos helps me to figure out the next step.  I think I'll add the green round I had planned, then piece them together, using the remaining strips I have ready for a border to hold everything together.