Howdy Ho there good neighbor. I’m pleased to say that deadline two quilt is done. Will pick up the slides tomorrow and if all is well with them I’ll be sending “Shine” off to the Vermont Quilt Festival. Whew. And for those counting seed beads, there aren’t all that many on this quilt, but there are a few here and there. Just a few. And that is quite good enough.

What else… the return of warm weather, the apparent coming of the apocolypse (where apple embraces intel) and that’s about all. As you were.

I’m sad to say goodbye to Tom Burns and KnowSpam which has served me well and given me back virtually spam-free email. A pleasure doing business with you and best wishes for your future endeavors! As of tonight when I flipped the switch to a new provider the stats are:

Knowspam has blocked 58,490 spams for you!

Knowspam has blocked a total of 103,636,683 spams

I’m switching to SpamArrest. This is a for-pay service which proved easy to set up and which has actually improved since the shut down of knowspam was announced. I copied most of my good and bad recipient and sender information from the lists accumulated by knowspam and that was that. If you’re doing something like this, I heartily recommend BBEdit because as their slogan goes “it doesn’t suck”. Great text editor and more.

Would you like french cuffs to go with that sleeve?

OK, it’s late and all but that picture is pretty darn funny. Keep looking. Keeping looking…… there you go.

But seriously folks, here’s some info about sleeves and all that jazz.

On behalf of the 50 or so people who visit here daily and the handful who leave comments, a little update. I’ve got the binding on deadline #2 and the sleeves are made.

While making the sleeves there were approaching thunderstorm warnings posted so I took advantage of the few hours of sun that we’d had and mowed the “back 40”. OK, it’s more like a “back half” but that doesn’t sound so good does it? Anyway, it’s gotten the first big whack of the year. Would have happened sooner but that darn rain!

In other news, there will be fresh bread today and tomorrow as new batches of Pain au Levain and Vermont Sourdough are busy doing their thing in the kitchen.

You’d think that baking bread would be a good mix with quilting, but probably not for this choppy stuff at the end of a project. Every time I was making progress upstairs the timer would go off indicating time for a fold or two of dough downstairs. Oh well. It all works out in the end.

Off to do a quick tick check, quick shower and then should be time to pop the first loaves in the oven. Oh and put the sleeves on the quilts. Then it’s all hand sewing.

One deadline down, one to go

Thursday night I decided enough was enough. The slides were good of my “I Remember Mama” quilt and I wasn’t going to shoot anymore. When I looked up after doing all the entry stuff it had taken the whole evening:

• Read through the rules again.
• Look at the slides again.
• Make labels for the slides and stick them on.
• Cut a little twosome of slide holder and put the slides in it.
• Look at the slides again.
• Copy over the entry form. Read over the “artist statement” and edit it before copying.
• Make a copy of that for me to keep.
• Address the return envelope and the outer envelope.
• Read over the entry instructions again: slides, form, check, photograph – ooops
• Print off one of the digitals and trim it to size. Seem to remember that it’s just for ID and book keeping so tried not to worry that it wasn’t as good as the slides
• Slides, photograph, form, check, self-addressed, stamped envelope
• Put it all into a bubble-wrap sort of envelope and sealed it with packing tape so I wouldn’t open it up and look at it anymore.

A whole evening. But done is done. Now it’s up to someone else to decide whether it’s good enough or right enough for that exhibit.

Oy.

I like the quilt very much with all its words in the background. Beading. Me – I did beading. And best of all it doesn’t look like a cheap Woolworth bracelet! LOL – it looks rather subtle like it belongs there. Regardless, I like the results, other people like it and even if it doesn’t get into this show, it will be in others.

Did I mention the fluorescent color envelope I always use for the return envelope so I can spot it right away? Oy.