catching up

we came home yesterday after spending the long weekend with our grandson

every day should begin with this kind of cuteness!

this is a shot of Mr. Cute wearing a little hat that someone gave my daughter (she's fortunate to have friends that have a son just enough older that she's getting some great "hand me downs" for Mr. Cute)

while I was there I did some measuring and determined that the little hat I have started for him is a great size -- I would have finished it while I was there except for having no velcro with me to do the little strap -- it should get finished in the next day or so then I'll be sending off another "squishy" envelope to him

one of the cool things about visiting with my daughter is that they live in a sort of urban/rural area

they are in a new subdivision that is planted right in the middle of what very recently was farm land

and because their house is on the outside edge of the development, this is the view off of their back deck on any given morning

note the farm house and buildings with the little clump of trees there on the right hand side of the picture

this is great inspiration for future landscape quilt pieces, and every time we go to visit I come back with a bunch of photos for reference later
while I was watching Mr Cute on Friday, I did some sketching of an idea for a new series that has been floating around in my head for a few weeks

evidently I'm not done with this whole nature and seasons idea

the idea of this is to do four pieces -- winter, spring, summer and fall

and these will be small pieces with the background done with watercolor pencils, the tree appliqued on and a lot of thread painting as embellishment

then I plan to put these into mats and frames (remember, I said these would be little)

can't wait to get started working on them -- but I have a couple of other things that I need to finish before I do, but at least I have the general idea on paper (as well as a lot of notes made about colors for each of the four pieces)
"ike and mike they look alike"

one of the things that actually get done when I travel is the knitting of charity afghan squares

yeah, I know this looks like the same square on two different backgrounds

trust me -- its not -- just right now I'm working my way through two "pound of love" skeins -- one bright pink, one variegated pink/blue with a very short color repeat -- and I'm just chugging along through them -- chances are that the next half dozen or so squares will also look just like this

so today I'm doing laundry and trying to get some other projects worked on (the monthly quilt guild meeting is coming up and I need to get my charity quilt top for the month finished) -- yeah and because I wasn't riding herd on my email, I have 310 of those to purge out --- YIKES!

into the fray!!