A little of this, a little of that

I'm going to have to find some occasion to wear these!

You know you have too much stuff when you go into a closet you seldom use and find, not one, not two, but three pairs of gorgeous sequined pumps. One is multi-colored, one black and one pearl. Gorgeous! From the masking tape price tags on the boxes, it's clear that I bought them from the thrift store in the building where I used to work. I used to find the best treasures there, and when I was working away from home practically my entire wardrobe came from the store.

As a bonus, at the end of the season, they cleared everything out. That's when I collected dozens of men's cotton shirts, and other cotton items, for future quilts. I think I spent most of last winter disassembling about two year's worth.

Test block

Back to sewing. I finished pinning the SITP yesterday and quilted one of the leftovers as a test block. I like the spirals, but think maybe they should be larger, maybe with a large spiral ending up in the center four-patch. Any thoughts? suggestions? I do like the variegated blue I used for the test and will stick with it.

I didn't want to start the quilting last night, so got back to my fabric postcards for a while. Since my free-motion machine is set up for the quilt, I just used my Singer 500, and tried out some new ideas. I'd been having problems getting it to do some of the decorative stitches, but I discovered that it works fine with the cams, so I used some of them. The water in all three of these cards was done using cams. I also tried sewing with a double needle. One of the nice things about the 500 is that you can actually use two needles, you don't have to have a special twin needle. The sand in the foreground of the right postcard was done with a double needle, one with variegated thread, the other a tan color.  I'll have to do some more experimenting with that.

Finally, last night I was reading through some blogs and ran across a mention of Zentangling, or Zendoodling. I'd heard the term and seen a couple of examples, but didn't really know what it was, so I looked it up. I've been a doodler forever, so I had to try it out. This one doesn't exactly follow the rules, as it is all pencil and fills the box, but it's a kind of cool first try. I have the feeling it won't be the last.

Lots to do today, so more later.