Weekly update: border decision and letting the squirrel out of the box

Brisk northeasterly winds brought rolling waves to the lake today.  The water temperature was a comfortable 72 degrees.


I have water shoes with perforated soles so I can wade and walk over the pebbles in comfort.

1.7" of rain mid-week was great for wildflowers as well as lawns and gardens.  (These wildflowers are in Illinois Beach State Park.)

Chicory, thistle (with an orange butterfly), butterfly weed.
Queen Anne's lace, monarda, purple prairie clover.
Lead plant, mullein (6' tall!), yucca.


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In the studio:

I've been mulling over border designs for the GITP quilt.  I had flying geese in mind and made 80 blue and 80 green.  But long rows seemed skimpy.  And should I alternate colors or do segments (four green, four blue, etc.)?





Then I had a WWBD? (what would Bonnie (Hunter) do?) inspiration.














The double rows will require 328 geese so I'm cutting and sewing more.  (As of this writing I've finished the green ones and have just begun the blues.)








And the squirrel in the box?

A while ago I began making 9" homespun churn dash blocks.  I completed one and finished the HSTs for several more.

I don't know how many blocks I'll make nor how I'll set them. Playing in my homespun stash is a nice diversion from the GITP project.



Linking up with Oh Scrap!
Monday Making
 Design Wall Monday

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This week's reading:  The Giver of Stars is the second novel about the pack horse librarians of Kentucky.  (The  Pack Horse Library Project was a WPA program to deliver books and magazines to people in the rural mountain country of eastern Kentucky.)  Both the first novel, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, and Giver of Stars have the pack horse librarians and the setting in common but the characters and the sub-stories are different.  I enjoyed both!

I brought the advance copy of Wild Nights back from ALA in 2017. My husband read it right away. I finally got around to it this week.  Our norm for sleeping conditions -- seven to eight hours of uninterrupted, continuous sleep,  bed-sharing only by consenting adults, children in their own beds and mostly in their own bedrooms -- is a North American and western European phenomenon developed in the 19th century.  A new way to think about what we think of as "how it is supposed to be."