News, of One Sort or Another

You may have figured out that odd news interests me. Guess that comes as no surprise, huh?! Carole left a comment on yesterday's blog about the cheese truck that caught fire today--actually the headline was "Cheese Truck Fire Makes Freeway Fondue." Just thought you'd want to know that happened here in Sacramento. Did you know that Sacramento is known for its tomatoes? Sometimes we call it--well, it's mostly radio DJ's who call it--"Sacratomato." Seems to me that if you paired up all that melted cheese and our summertime tomatoes, you could come up with a pretty tasty snack!

I'm a little more fascinated by another story: "Family Searches Feces of Cash-Eating Dog." I wonder if their money grows on trees? You know how dogs like trees. And bushes. And fire hydrants.

I know, though, that I owe you all some quilting news, especially since you listened to me rant yesterday. Okay, here's a fairly clean drawing of my second Americana applique block. Next step will be picking out the fabric I want to use. I think the basket will be mostly a light denim blue; if I used the traditional light brown, I don't think the pie crust would show up. The apples will, of course, be red. Maybe a red coffee cup too? I envision quilting "steam" rising from the cup, by the way.

During my lunch hour today, I headed over to a nearby quilt shop, JR Flamingo. This isn't one I go to often (thank goodness there's ONE shop around that doesn't suck me in and it happens to be the closest!) because mostly they specialize in Asian fabrics and "arty" stuff. Of course, I enjoy seeing that kind of thing every so often, but it's not a staple in my stash-building endeavors. Today, though, I wanted to check out some bag patterns, and I knew they had a decent selection. I ended up with this pattern:

I guess I should also tell you that I started out with a pattern from a magazine and, since I've never made a bag before, I really was just interested today in seeing what's out there in patterns, and this shop has a fair number of shop samples, so I could see them made up. I think I probably WILL make the one from the magazine first but I'll probably get to this one eventually too.

Another thing this particular shop carries is dupioni silk. I couldn't resist buying these:

These are pretty much the colors in my livingroom at Christmas along with a bit of green and maybe a little purple, and I had visions of making a tablerunner using the dupioni silk appliqued onto wool--probably black wool. I'm not sure it's a feasible idea, but I'll think about it for awhile and see what I come up with.

That's about it for the news from my part of the world. I hope all your news is good too!