Two Kinds of Trips

Appropriately enough for a quilting blog, a trip-around-the-world quilt is the first kind of trip I'm writing about today. I was inspired to post this photo since I've seen so many blogs where people joined Bonnie's Super Bowl and made scrappy bargello quilts on Super Bowl Sunday.

I made this Trip Around the World top in 2005, one of the first tops I pieced. I had gone to a Project Linus work day and noticed that there were lots of strips in the Linus stash and I determined to use them up. I did an internet search and found Bonnie's Quiltville website with directions for using up strips to make very simply constructed, scrappy bargello or Trip Around the World quilts. Hers was the first quilting website I bookmarked -- if you haven't been there, go! She has lots of ideas and shares them freely. Bonnie's a real boon to the online quilting community.

I tried to use a red fabric (or purple, when I ran out of red) in the same place in each block to provide some visual organization (I have a hard time with total randomness), but it never seemed like a Linus quilt to me. About two weeks ago I stitched the blocks together and decided I'd border it to make it big enough to back a Linus quilt. Some child will have lots of fun looking at all those fabrics!

The second trip I'll mention here is the one I took to San Diego last November to walk with my daughter Jocelyn in the 60-mile, 3 Day Walk to raise money for the Susan G. Komen Foundation for breast cancer research. Jocelyn is quite taken with pirates, so we named our team the Pink Pirates. Toni at the Quilting Pirate had posted some wonderful pink quilting pirate fabric (the crossbones are made of scissors), so I ordered it to make scarves for us to wear. Turns out the store also had knitting pirate fabric (with knitting needles for crossbones), and since Jocelyn is a knitter, I got that for her.
Here we are in our scarves, posing with a pink-shirted San Jose policeman. A bunch of cops from San Jose volunteers to help patrol the San Diego walk every year, and they are terrific! They wear pink shirts (and often lots of other bling) and ride decorated bikes all along the walking route. They were there for our safety, but provided lots of moral support and were really funny, joking and singing and laughing with the walkers.
Decorated vans also drove the route to pick up any walkers that were having trouble. Here's one of my favorite vans, decorated with pink bras!
At one of the rest areas I saw this quilt, which I think must have been used as a fundraiser. (The hardest part of the walk for me was raising money!) If you click for a closer look, you can see that the quilt squares are signed by donors.

The walk was an amazing experience, and if it weren't for the annoying plantar fasciitis I have in my right foot, I would have recovered right away. I'm still in the process of stretching out my achilles tendon and strengthening various parts of my foot to ease the pressure. Here's a photo of my feet in yoga toe stretchers. Looks odd, but I'm starting to like how they feel!