Tom has been playing with leaf shadows, so I’ve been looking myownself on my walk home at leaves and shadows.

I’ve seen lots and lots of fascinating shadows, but haven’t seen anything specific (like his Arc de Triomphe) but then I decided just liking the shadows should be enough, since (to me at least) they are fascinating whether they look like something to me or not. (I always sucked at the game where you have to figure out what clouds look like.)

Cooked down six pumpkins today, to give us a total of 15 cups of pumpkin.

Hopefully, this will last us–last winter we ran out of pumpkin in February.

It’s 40 and raining, and the ducks were paddling around like it was 80.

But they were happy, so who am I to critique?

Today I spent time creating my design and ordering the blocks.

I found a design I thought would be a nice one to start with in one of the quilting magazines I found, but I wanted to modify it some, so I started playing around on Excel, and came up with someone quite different from what It thought it was going to be. But that’s good, because I like this a lot better.

Then Michael helped me figure out the math: how wide to cut my strips, how big the resulting blocks will be (taking 1/4 inch seams into account) and how many blocks make what sized quilt, and then rearranging the design once again to work better with the final quilt size I wanted.

It is completely out of character for me to plan this much ahead of time for ANYTHING, but I want to do it right, and figuring everything out was kinda fun actually.

Since I want to work with gradients, I also organized the fabric into lights, darks, and mid-colors. You can see a hint of the pattern I came up with on the screen of my laptop. (Let me tell you, for something like this, the format painter is TOTALLY your best friend.)

And that’s where we are this evening. Depending upon how things go, perhaps tomorrow I’ll start cutting strips.

Sad Kit is sad.

She totally misses Anne.

My fabric came today! Since it’s my first “real” quilt (I’ve done patch quilts before, but those were easy) I chose my favorite colors.

See! So pretty!

I got nothing today (that’s not entirely true, I have a bad mood, and I read an entire book, neither of which is useful to this endeavor), so here’s a shot I snapped while Anne was here that I really liked (and discovered on my phone the other day).

(photo is part of this set)

Since I don’t feel like showing pictures of the empty recycling bins or the space where there were piles of crap earlier today or even the space I cleaned up and then set up for my sewing machine, you get 1/3rd of today’s project–elastic on my pj bottoms. I really really hate it when my calves are exposed when I’m sleeping.

Perhaps something interesting tomorrow.