Monday: Wish I Were Here

At a party. Outside, in the sunshine, wearing a flippy skirt and laughing up at the sky. Preferably in a location that requires a passport for me to get there.

News, in a nutshell:

-Travel plans firming up: Looks like I'll be in Israel for Valentine's day

-I officially have no weekends until March. Whee.

-Nearly finished piecing the top of my first quilt. Pics to follow.

xoxo!

Monday: Wish I Were Here

Hunched over yards and yards of colorful fabric, upstairs. Tea on the windowsill, kitties on the futon. Patsy Cline on low.

But I'm downstairs, working on a cover letter. Grrr.

But, I wanted to share some of my current dilemma:

At the beginning of the summer, I started my first "quilt." I figured it would be like a first novel, a learning experience where the first one is guaranteed to suck, and you either have to just get the first one out of the way and move on, or spend a decade perfecting the first one.

I figured I'd just get this quilt out of the way. So I chose colors with reckless abandon, with no one in particular in mind. I figured it could be a lap quilt, or a baby quilt for my next niece or nephew. I firmly decided to just learn on this quilt, and not be upset if it didn't turn out perfectly.

I also resolved to actually iron the fabric. Quilting, turns out, is really mostly ironing.

So, I spent a few weeks tooling around on the machine. Here's what I got:

Problem is, now I love it. And I'm terrified to touch it.

It's time to start piecing the blocks together, and sewing borders and backing fabric. I have three fabrics I'm going to use, but I'm not sure which should be the inner border, and which should be the outer border.

Close up of my dilemma:

I'm thinking the flowery blue one should be the backing, because it's a tad girly to be next to the orange one. So then the question becomes, should it be an orange inner border (touching the blocks) and a blue outer border? Or vice verse?

Monday: Wish I Were Here

Morocco

I've been working my way through this cookbook for a few months now, and I have the travel bug, bad. The pictures just make we want to teleport.

We're moving June 1st, and the new place will have a designated classroom for me and my students. I'm so excited! We're picking out colors to paint the walls as we speak. I have been really inspired by some of the rich reds and golds and vibrant sea blues, and think they would work well in a room that will do triple duty as a classroom, office, and guest room.

If you could teleport right this very minute, where would you go?

Monday: Wish I Were Here

Costa Rica:

Six months after Ed and I started dating, we booked plane tickets to Costa Rica. We had both just gotten in to grad school, and decided that summer was our last chance to have a wild, reckless adventure, footloose and fancy free. We spent three months trekking around, sharing an apartment the size of our living room, even hosting our friends when they flew out to visit. Now, we like to think of it as our "relationship boot camp," because sharing such a small space for so long, relocating to a community where the only people we knew were each other, and being so far from everything that was familiar really intensifies things. It brought things to the surface: the good, the bad, the ugly.

Even though we were both so ready to come home, now every time May 1st approaches, I remember us on that plane, and the night we landed in Liberia. The airport had a thatched roof, I squealed "Mi primer estampilla!" as they stamped my passport, we found an Italian restaurant in our apartment complex and listened to the monkeys as we wolfed down sausage pizza.