a suffolk summer quilt

We're just back from our summer holidays; this year, a month spent in Suffolk (on the east coast of England) with my family.

With the warmest English weather I can ever remember, we spent as many days as would could at the seaside, and then returned home to lay down blankets and sit in the garden together, looking out over the most amazing iridescent yellow fields. Something I've missed terribly since moving to Texas is a summer spent outside, and so the sea air and the evening breezes that swept up over the Waveney Valley gave me the deep, clear breaths I'd been missing.






We picked up a few souvenirs from this trip -- a handful of carefully chosen beach stones, two handmade mugs from my favourite gallery in Southwold, a few bars of Cadbury's -- but perhaps most meaningfully, my Mum and I worked together on a couple of quilt tops inspired by the local summer colours.

The mustard yellow fields. The chilly grey-and-navy sea. The pale warm sand. The bright pops of beach huts along the shore.

And what a lovely reminder it is proving to be. I'm still quilting it at the moment, but I've loved wrapping it around my shoulders even now -- loose ends, safety pins and all -- while looking through photos from the trip.




More than other other quilt, this one is infused with a sense of calm and well-being; the feeling of rest, of being home and really known. Something unexplainable that comes, perhaps, from the sharing of fabrics and time and this period of life spent together.

the quilt that entertains your kids: an eye-spy tutorial

An eye-spy quilt is simply a design that features a large range of novelty prints, from animals to vehicles, people to plants -- anything that can be "spotted". For this latest quilt, though, I decided to take the game one step further and make a physical, hold-in-your-hand checklist of some of the quilt's landmark prints.



In case you'd like to use the idea for your next eye-spy quilt, too, here's how I put mine together.

Materials:
Several squares of novelty fabrics to be used in the quilt
Printer paper
A scanner
Laminating supplies (optional)

What to do:
1. Place your fabric squares in the scanner, face down. Scan each one, and save them on your computer.



2. Open Pages (or your word processing program of choice). Create a new blank document.

3. Drag in each of your scanned fabric images. I chose to lay them out in a grid, but it would also work to have them positioned vertically, like a list.

(Tip: In Pages, you can add one image, and then save your document as a template. Close and reopen your document. Duplicate the first image as many times as necessary, and then drag each subsequent image onto one of the duplicates. This makes each image the same exact size. You might know an easier way to do this already, though...!)



4. (Optional) Add a textbox under each image, with a description of the fabric.

5. Print. I chose to laminate the sheets, so that the images can be crossed off with a dry-erase marker when found, and then the sheets can be wiped clean and reused.

Perfect for rainy-day or sick-in-bed entertainment!

life, squared

I am a square, and you are a square, sewn together by red thread. 

Sometimes we forget that we only need to fit together along one side. One square cannot complete all the sides of another. It's geometrically impossible, without enveloping the other. We don't need to be the same colour or the same pattern; we can be total opposites and that's okay, too. We're just two squares, in the end, and we alone do not make the design. 

This morning is a square and the words you said yesterday at breakfast are a square and what happens tomorrow afternoon will be a square, and all we have to do is run our fingers over them and appreciate that they are here, no matter whether we think they fit. They are sewn to us. We are sewn to them. We are sewn to each other and to the people we love and to people who don't know us and to the people next door who climb their trees and throw pinecones over the fence at us. We cannot unpick our seams. Nor should we try.