Summer vs Studio

I don't know how many other quilters are gardeners, but I suspect that many are as we all have an affinity for color, and many of us are inspired by nature. It is difficult to balance studio time and time to maintain and enjoy gardens, yard, and the great outdoors. Throw in a six-year old and you've got a real limited amount of time for working on quilts! I have the additional problem of having my sewing room on the northwest corner of the house where it gets a very hot afternoon sun on two sides and becomes rather warm until the sun goes down. All this to say that I have done little or no fiber art creating in the last couple of weeks. Gardens full of weeds forced me to give them attention and now at least the vegie gardens look very tidy---but as you gardeners will know, that won't last long!!

We've been lucky enough to have thunderstorms with rain in recent days (that ought help those weed out!). What a blessing here in Montana where it is usually quite hot and dry in August. I am enjoying the cooler air and not having to water the gardens as frequently. There have been some forest fires in the area and the evening skies with the smoke makes for some very inspiring sunsets. In case you haven't experienced this phenomenon where you live, the skies turn very red near the sun and shades of pink all the away around and to the east. Not sure if the full moon will be visible tonight with the overcast skies, but if it clears a bit, it might be beautiful sight in the red tinted skies of the evening. Can you imagine it……???

What I have done in my studio in recent days is supervise my young son in making a small quilted wall hanging he wants to enter into the Ravalli County Fair this year. He has decided on two rail fence and two log cabin blocks and is working on pressing fabric and cutting the strips out. We should be ready to sew and this year I'm thinking of letting him try to do that by himself instead of sitting on my lap. He has very good coordination if I can just keep him focused and paying close attention to what he is doing. Six year olds tend to be easily distracted!

Still no sign of my 12"x12" SAQA auction donation quilt. It is sad to know that it is gone and not know that at least someone is enjoying it on their wall somewhere. I regret that I didn't send it in earlier so that maybe I would have had time to create another one to donate by the deadline. Next time I will definitely use UPS where I can track my package.

This weekend we picked over 7 quarts of huckleberries in one morning. I made a pie, but froze most of them. My son contributes very little to what actually comes home in the buckets, but he sure enjoys eating them. I hurried home so that I could get to our local bead shop, The Beaded Pony, to see what the bead traders had for sale. They had five tables of strings of various kinds of beads and I bought more than I should have. I got a couple of beautiful strands of stones and some shell beads. They had much more that I would have been happy to take home, but you gotta stop somewhere!

Tomorrow I will be helping to judge the Stevensville Creamery Picnic Kiddie Parade. Not quite sure what that means, but they need some help and I'm sure it will be fun. The Creamery Picnic is a yearly festival and is usually a very fun event. They have a larger parade on Saturday and then lots of activities going on in the park and downtown. I'm hoping to stop at the local library for their book sale where I usually pick up some good stuff for a bargain.