Housekeeping - Overcoming the Photo Block

 In my effort to revive the blog, I have to be honest. One of the reasons I tend to fall into long stretches of non-blogging is my utter lack of technical skills. Specifically, my lack of technical skills and confidence in the management of photos.

When I started blogging... ten years ago... I managed somehow to upload the photos I wanted to use, and then there came a time when the format of the photos had to change. The photo-hosting service I used to use I can't even remember the name of. And there was limited storage, and I had to learn how to transfer the photos from the camera to the computer, and then I had to crunch them down using photoscape. I'm not sure if I still have to do that, but I've been dutifully crunching my photos down in size using that program for years. But then I got an iPhone, and taking photos did become a lot easier. But getting them from the iCloud to my photo files on my computer is a pain, and by the time I download the ones I want I'm out of mental energy to process them and archive them properly. Surely, it is easier for some people, but I end up with zip files that I don't know how to deal with... am I sounding pathetic yet? 

As the technology for photo sharing has improved, I noticed I was sharing things on Facebook and Instagram because it was just plain easy. But of course, there are increasingly negative tradeoffs when that's the only format you use. 

Anyway, long story short, managing photos is a headache for me. I need to break the mental block and blog about the things I like. So here are some that I just snagged as representative of the year so far, and maybe I can skip the downsizing this time. In the interest of keeping blogging, with the occasional photo.

This is the Frolic quilt that was the 2019 Mystery quilt from Bonnie K. Hunter. I blogged about it a little while I was working on it. It became a wedding gift for my firstborn last May! Now, of course, I am still working on the Grassy Creek quilt and the Unity Quilt that Bonnie shared. They aren't finished yet. And the 2021 mystery will be starting up really soon. So, looking on the bright side, I will have plenty of pictures to share as I work through those.

This is the Frugal Patch quilt variation I've been envisioning for many years and working on sporadically. It's the kind of thing I have to pack away between sessions because it's too big to leave on the design wall. But I'm excited about the possibility.

A couple of the baby quilts I've been making during the pandemic. Basic 4" or 5" squares, no batting, backed with flannel that can be folded to the front and topstitched for a binding. All the babies of my acquaintance (or at least the firstborns) are starting to get them, and I can turn one out in a day or two.

Three or four years ago I bought a bunch of mini orchids at Grocery Outlet. I managed to keep most of them alive, and they even rebloom occasionally. This makes me quite happy, and I take pictures of them.

Cleverly Practical, the "Hermione" socks from the Harry Potter collection by Lisa Ross. I really like them.

So, it does seem I can share photos again, even though my blogging interface looks a bit different than it did over a year ago. And you can have a taste of what my social media circle has already seen that I've been doing lately, but I can write about it in my preferred conversational blog format.

I'll settle for that as progress.

Two Finished Quilts! And other quilty updates

I haven't been blogging much in the past few months, but I have been quilting. There has been an attempt to revive the quilting group that meets at my church, but we're not sure if that will take quite yet. Still, I demonstrated a basic, Snowball 9-Patch quilt pattern that is very user-friendly. Daniel needed a quilt for his full-size mattress that he has now, so I dug into my scraps and came up with this; pieced in a week or two, quilted in a few days:

The longer I stay in this quilting hobby, the scrappier my quilts get. The weather cooperated for quilt photography outside today, but it was starting to sprinkle by the time I was done. This will need to be boxed up and mailed to Daniel soon.

 This is Allietare! The mystery quilt from two years ago, and probably my favorite of all the ones I've done so far. It felt wonderful to get this one quilted. I used the same squiggle-loop-star overall pattern that I've settled on as the easiest for me to use on the Megaquilter.

 I really like that scalloped border and binding!

 This is a queen-sized quilt, so will probably eventually end up on our bed.

Celtic Solstice, a mystery quilt from even farther back, maybe 2013, is on the Megaquilter now. I'm having a few issues with bumpiness on the carriage rails; I think the plastic tracks are abrading and need to be replaced. I'm doing a wavy border and outline quilting on the wild geese, and then squiggle-loop-star in the central area. After this, I still have at least 4 tops to quilt, 2 of them Quiltville mysteries! I'm going to do my best to crank them out.

 Here is my design wall with my Frugal Patch color study. I can't remember whether I blogged about this much, but it's a project I have had in mind for 10 years. I spent a lot of time several months ago cutting jillions of rectangles for the "paths" of colorwash, and the squares for the diamond "pavement" squares. My basic idea is to fade in rainbow order along the paths, light and dark, with the diamonds being a complementary color to the paths, although there will be a few surprises. And the background of the diamonds will be neutrals from white through beige through gray/brown/navy/black.

 I did a lot of fussy rearranging of the dark blues in the sample block, and decided I needed to just piece them into pairs and arrange from there. Hopefully that will make it easier.

Here are several of my warm-color diamond patches. I'm really curious to see how this will turn out. Sometime soon I need to decide what size and how many blocks to make for the quilt.