Tuesday, April 16, 2013

A Little Spring Miracle

I did this dopey thing and learned something. These pictures are in the order that the occurred.  I just needed to share.

I found this cool blue vase on a clearance shelf and since I have nothing like it and it was seriously on sale, I bought it. Later, I picked up some yellow tulips.

The next day I put them together and really loved the yellow and green and blue.  I didn't do a lot of fussy arranging, but just stuck them in the vase and put them on the table in the front hall.

The following morning I went to admire my handiwork and found this.



It seems that in my excitement to create some color contrast, I forgot to put water in the vase.  I felt like such a dork, as well I should have.  Since I had nothing to lose, I filled the vase with water and left it in the kitchen to see if I could revive the poor flowers just a little.



Over the next few hours, I found that tulips are a lot more sturdy than I gave them credit for.  


















Little by little, they straightened up.  Every time I looked at them,  they were just a little more lively.


After just a few hours, they were beautiful again.




By evening, they were almost as good as new.  We should all be so resilient. 

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

A Little Dose of April

Today is a vintage April Day in the Willamette Valley.  It's about 60, breezy, rainy, then sunny, now cloudy.   There's still time to wrap the day up with some thunder and hail.  Don't care for the weather?  Stick around, it could be totally different in 10 minutes.

I took the tulip pics about 15 minutes ago.  I love the colors and how tough these spring charmers are.  We had rain and torrential downpour last weekend and I thought they'd really get clobbered, but no, they're still here.  

These were planted last fall.  I've never had any with stripes on the edges of the leaves.  Pretty cool. This fall I want to plan a bunch more for a more showy spring.


About 5 minutes ago I took this picture.


Then I turned and took this one in the opposite direction.
  

Since then it's started and stopped raining. It makes everything green:  The grass, the trees, the deck, the flower pots, the sidewalk.  There's a reason this is power-washer country.



The best thing about warmer weather for Toby is the ability to be both inside and outside.  Usually, the back end is in the house, and head and forefeet are outside.  Apparently, he needed a little sun.  


I've been finishing some Quilters on the Edge projects to hang in the Metropolitan Patchwork Society show at the end of the month.  I'm nearly finished with the last one, but found that I needed a little distraction so I looked through my UFO stack to find something completely different.  This is from a Valori Wells book.  I started it probably six or seven years ago.  Batting and backing were already attached so I could just quilt.  I love all the colors and movement through the quilt.

All that's left now is to bind it.  I've mentioned this before and I likely will again:  Cut binding before putting a project away.  I would love to have the purple in the narrow border repeated in binding and hope that I can find something that works.  Actually, several different things could work, but I want it to be better than just okay.  

Last week I started a post that was a big whine about electronics that do not work and play well together. Not posting it. Sometimes it's good to moan about stuff for a while and then dump it.  Gets it out of the system.  I was working on the pattern for Blue Star Mothers and playing musical computers.  It seems that Electric Quilt does not work with MAC.  It also won't do the metafile thing with any word processor but WORD.  Enter one elderly laptop that only talks to the printer when physically attached.  Once I got it all figured out, it went pretty well.  Now, about the website . . .  We're working on it.

Quilt for the fun of it!
Candy