A brief return to quilting

For those who may think that I simply skip from project to experiment to project, I present this as evidence that I do so finish (some) things! Granted, the First Grandkid is already three months old, but I know of some grandchildren who were in kindergarten before their crib quilts are finished. It's not a very demanding design, but it's to the Organizer's specs: she said his room theme was going to be elephants, and elephants he got; red and gold ones galumphing all over the quilt. (You can't tell from the picture, but the red pieces actually have gold elephants printed on them.)

Fortunately she didn't add the information that his room theme was going to be grey and ecru elephants. At least this doesn't clash with them, and I explained to her that most of the elephants I'd seen up close and personal were in Tsavo National Park, which has red soil and little rain, so they actually were red - well, covered in red dust. They blended quite well with the landscaps. A little too well. The road from Mombasa to Nairobi was, after you got into the uplands, well over two hundred miles of dead-straight two-lane and it was dangerously easy to get into a sort of driving trance in which you assumed a red elephant in the road ahead was a piece of the distant horizon until you were much too close to him. At which point one would turn off the engine and sit very quietly and politely in the car until the elephant decided to move.(As a matter of principle, I never honk at anything that outweighs me by more than two tons.)

Ah well, that was 40 years ago. I wonder if they've kept that road low-profile and easy to cross in the interests of the wildlife, or if it's been turned into a freeway with fences and occasional bridges over Designated Animal Crossings?

Always seeing rainbows

I got the string of green glass beads up some time ago (i.e., talked my tall husband into hanging it) and surprise, surprise, it didn't need any extra support; it hangs in a graceful swag from far left hook to far right hook. So I used the free cup hooks to hang loops of green glass beads. Took forever to get a picture, because you have to catch it at the right time of day and there was this problem with getting my camera back from the house hob, which required an abject apology, some groveling, and the sacrifice of a handful of ballpoint pens. But here it is:

At this time of the year, most of the day,the sun shines right through it, which makes it impossible to photograph but in compensation, the chandelier crystals throw mini-rainbows around my workroom and the kitchen. I've also cleaned up the windowsill and filled it with things like tall jars of sea glass and desert glass and a big abalone shell and a shell-shaped bowl to hold my strings of pearls.

There remains a rather large window through which you can still see Central Texas; but right now Texas is remarkably green, so I'm not highly motivated to work on that.

Come the dry season, when the window shows a lot of dead grass, I'll probably think of something. In any case, this'll be the last decorating blog for a while, because I've been making things that I want to talk about.

How well do you see color?

Test yourself here.

I got a 27, which isn't disgraceful for someone over 60, but I had expected to do a lot better.

(Via Ann Althouse.)