strings and rows and pretty shapes

This coming Saturday is Make A Blanket Day for Project Linus, and getting ready for it has taken up most of my quilting time recently. It's fun, but I'm getting impatient to get back to my own projects. One of our big MABD projects will be making heartstring blocks -- they're easy to do, and inevitably we get eager attendees who don't know how to sew. This is such a fun way to learn! This morning I stitched together some blocks we made at a worknight so we'd have a sample to show on Saturday.
The only personal quilting I've had time for this week is my new I Spy. I was able to cut up shapes on the breakfast table while all the Linus stuff was spread out downstairs by the sewing machine. With all the pieces for each row in a little baggie, it's pretty easy to stitch a row. It amazes me how hard my first I Spy was to make, and how now I think of it as easy, mindless sewing.
And just for your aesthetic delight, how's this?
That's my new olive oil dipping bowl that's sculpted into onion-like layers. The golden green puddle is cold-pressed, extra-virgin, polyphenol-rich olive oil. It's good -- so good, so very very good! I discovered how send-me-to-the-moon delicious really fine olive oil can be when we visited Italy a few years ago, and now I'm splurging on the occasional bottle of this wonderful stuff. Unlike your grocery store vegetable oils, each one has its own spunky personality. Mmmmm.....

Inspiring photos

Liz Plummer posts some wonderful photos on her blog, Dreaming Spirals. She draws inspiration from things we often see but don't notice. Her spider webs are fabulous! Most recently I got a big kick out of her salad collage. (Scroll down the salad page to see the spider webs, both the fake and the real ones.) It made me realize that I have started to take photos of things just because they are aesthetically pleasing to me. Of course, artists and "real" photographers do that, but I always took photos so I could remember people and places. Having a digital camera freed me to take pictures just because I wanted the image. Here's one I took of the roasted vegetables I made for dinner awhile back. It's yummy visually as well as gastronomically.

I will probably never make a quilt out of this photo, but thinking about what I see has definitely sharpened my sensibilities.