Quilting related shopping...

Although I did do a little sewing this morning, most of my quilting time today (not that I have a set amount of quilting time per day or anything - I wish!) was spent visiting with my friend Brenda, who has a little quilt shop in her house in Wimbledon. She used to have a quilt shop with another lady, but retired a while ago, and now takes her stuff to a few local groups, has customers who come to see her, does mail order and some small local shows. I have a sort of subscription to QNM through her - she lets me know when each new issue arrives and once a month (or so) I go up to visit her, get my magazines, check out any interesting new books she might have, and buy fabric if I need something specific for a swap, etc. She doesn't have a huge stock, but often she'll have something appropriate for a swap if my stash is low in that area. And she's only 15 minutes from me, rather than half an hour or more, for any other quilt shops. And I can park in her driveway, which makes life easy. Anyway, today I didn't buy any fabric, just some magazines and a book about using up bits and pieces, which had some fun ideas in it. I do enjoy reading quilting books, even if I don't make anything from them. We'll see whether I actually ever use this one, or whether I just read it...

The little bit of sewing I did do this morning (less than an hour) was to make a few more corn and beans blocks, and to sew some of the finished ones together into groups of four - I am trying not to be too controlling with these blocks, so rather than wait until all the little blocks are finished and then lay the whole thing out and try to balance it, I am going to join them all into fours as I go along. THEN I will lay them out and work on balance - I think that will be a lot easier in the end, and I need to stress less about these things! They look good so far, I think, but I'm eager to get another two at least, so I can check out the way the pale triangles come together to make squares, too.

A side note: I finally went ahead and changed over to blogger beta last night, and I will say, one thing I really like about it is the way photos are handled when you are creating a post - no more guessing just which photo is which or where they will appear. I'm less thrilled by the fact that you tend to get more anonymous comments, but presumably as other bloggers move over, that will resolve itself. We'll see how the beta defeats or redeems itself as I go on - I've heard mixed opinions so far.