Blurry photo day

I spent an hour or so (but time flies when I'm looking at quilting magazines) looking for ideas for a quilt for Frances, Brian's mother. I narrowed it down to 3, with a fairly strong preference for one of them -- fortunately, Brian chose my favorite! I scanned the picture in, the first scan of our new machine, and it's not a great copy. (Oddly, I see it is in sharper focus here than on iPhoto.)

The quilt, designed by Laura Franchini, is in the January/February2006 issue of Quiltmaker magazine. She used Asian fabrics and quilted koi on it in metallic thread. The pattern is simple, the results -- at least hers! -- are stunning. I plan to use silvery greys and rosy pinks, the colors Frances has in her home.



Pondering the blurriness of the quilt scan, I was reminded of a blurry photo I took last Thursday on a bouncy little airplane from Chicago to the cornfields I call home. The sun had only just set, so the sky and lake still shimmered blue rather than black, and the city lights were on. It was a fairyland, but I wasn't able to capture it through the window. Still, the photo reminds me of how spectacular it was; I hope you can get an inkling of the beauty of night falling over the Windy City.