Clothesline art?

I hang laundry outside to dry whenever possible.  It seems wrong somehow to use electrical energy to do what the sun and wind will do cheaper and better! (And we certainly have both sun and wind a-plenty here!)  So from April to September when the sun falls on the side yard beside the house, I put the wash out on my umbrella dryer.

 My mother taught me to hang tops by the bottoms and bottoms by the top, to place pegs at seam lines, to hang "unmentionables" in behind the bigger stuff -- because what might people think!  (I wondered at that -- if people really looked critically at one another's laundry, would they start thinking that no one ever washed underwear?).

The other day my neighbour told me that her young son was watching me hang out clothes while he ate his breakfast.  His comment was that the end result was "beautiful"!

Now that I am aware of an art critic across the street,  I find myself paying attention to the composition of the finished product.  Have I balanced the colours?  Should the red shirts be together?   Will the long lines of the legs of the jeans look good beside the rectangles of the towels?  Should I put all the dish towels together so that they will dance when the breeze comes up?

Quilting in July

It is only mid-July, but it has already turned into a long, hot summer here.

This is today's view across the valley -- we actually can see across the valley today, as the smoke is a bit lighter that it has been.  No wildfires threatening the immediate area, but there are bad fires throughout the region, and a record number of people have been evacuated.

So what's a girl to do when the air is full of smoke?  First, make sure necessary items are easy to grab in case fires do happen close to home.  And then -- quilting!

I've been busy, but with projects that I can't show for one reason or another.

Yesterday I reached the borders on a project.  This one clearly needed mitred borders.  So I measured and pressed and measured  and stitched  -- and my mitre looks fine.

But I remembered why I usually avoid mitres at any cost.  Sure, I can do it, and it looks great, but now I need to do it again.  And again.  And again!!  And I did, and it turned out fine, but this is really not my favourite task.   

You may notice that the inner dark border has NOT been mitred.  I chose not to mitre that one due to the methods used for construction and quilting -- borders were added stitch-and-flip method after the main quilting was done -- and that dark border is only one quarter inch wide.