This has been a pretty busy summer already, and it wasn’t planned out to be!

Nathan’s parents were just here for a week. One of the things we did was take a little road trip up to Silver City. Well, we went to City of Rocks, Silver City, and then started up to the Gila Cliff Dwellings but made it about 95% of the way when majority vote wanted to turn around. We actually cut East much farther North than I traced out here, a little farther North than Elephant Butte.

When we stopped in Silver City, I visited the cutest yarn shop! Yada Yada Yarns.

I love the color! And all the racks of yarn outside really drew me in!

Mazie loved these big scissors!

Here’s the owner, bagging up my purchase.

It is a very beautiful, creative space, and there was a real sense of community. You can just feel that the LYS vibe is alive and well here.

Here’s me and Mazie walking back from having some gelato (Marv and Mary are in the background.) She was so covered in it that we had to take her shirt off! :0

After Silver City, we went on up to the Gila National Forest, then came back. The road doesn’t look that long, but you go probably 2000 feet in elevation up and down windy mountain roads. Believe me, as the person in the “way back” seat of the van…it’s enough to make you green in the gills. All that swaying back and forth, holding on, trying not to be sick! WOAH!

But, it was fun!

The parents have gone home, and we’re by ourselves. Mazie and I are taking it kind of easy today. I took some quilt FO pictures, made some frozen yogurt, and now we’re chilln’ on the bed. RELAXING.

Quilt FO (click to see more.)

This is the largest quilt I’ve ever finished. Finishing the binding warranted me putting on a dress and doing a little pose.

I was tempted to really crop these images, because to the casual observer, it may look as though I live in a prison yard, or am interned in some sort of work camp. Nope. Our yard and those of our neighbors are just Old School NM scruffy.

About the quilt. It’s about 8′ x 7′ and fits our queen-sized bed. I hand dyed nearly all of the fabrics myself. They are part of a mid-90s Moda series by “Patek” that I bought as an approximately 3lb lot on eBay for about $23 including shipping. They started out as the typical peach, sage green, burgundy, hunter green, and crayon blue of that era.

I used Dharma dyes in shades of orchid, rust orange, turquoise, jade, and strawberry.

Most of the fabrics were already in pieces, and I pretty much used them as I found them.

I used a bamboo batting, and a Tina Givens print for the back, adding strips of dark green Kona cotton at top and bottom because I didn’t quite have enough of the print.

I quilted the whole thing myself on the machine, using a back and forth long zigzag, doing small sections at a time. The “back” button on my machine stays on, so that I can reverse forever and have both hands free.

I quilted using lilac, olive, and turquoise thread interchangeably in both bobbin and spool.

I have two more unfinished quilt tops to piece, batt, back, and bind! I’d like to, as a little side experiment before going on to more behemoth-sized quilts, do a few little wall quilts or doll quilts to practice my freehand quilting. We’ll see how the rest of the summer plays out, timewise, I guess.

Last weekend was our 10th (I almost wrote 25th!) wedding anniversary.

I wanted to take Nathan on a road tip that he’d really enjoy. He’d been talking about Marfa since we first moved to the Southwest about 3 years ago, so it seemed like the perfect destination for this short little trip.

We left on Friday at 3 in the afternoon and landed at the Thunderbird Hotel in Marfa, TX at around 6:30. The drive was ok…I was knitting away on a project, so the three-point-five hours flew by for me! (I’m sure that last leg through Far West Texas felt pretty long for Nathan, though!

That first night, we ate dinner at Maiya’s Restaurant. It was Reeeeally Good. I had some sort of grapefruit / tequilla cocktail…Highly Recommend.

Saturday, we went to the Chinati Foundation for the 10am tour, ate lunch at the Pizza Foundation (excellent, NY-style pizza) and went back to Chinati for the rest of the tour at 2. For dinner, we decided to go for “bar food” at Barunda’s. Great tacos and cold Tecate!

The Chinati Foundation is a big indoor / outdoor art exhibition. Donald Judd founded it in the 1970s, and it houses permanent exhibitions of his work, that of Dan Flavin, and others. I had never seen anything like it. The property was at one time used to housee refugees from the Mexican-American War, German WWII prisoners, and eventually the buildings were re-habbed into artist residences and exhibition spaces.

I liked seeing both the reuse of old buildings (and the intentional preservation of them in their “old-looking” state.) It was also interesting to see “one man’s vision” so to speak, carried to such an extreme. There must be 100 or more of these bunker-buildings.

The town of Marfa is population 2121. Really small, and not all artists. That was interesting, too. To see how this art space has affected the little town.

(As always, If you click on any of the above pics, you can see the whole set on Flickr.)

On a less happy note, my dad’s sister died on Saturday. She passed away during a diabetic coma, like the ones my dad has been experiencing this spring. If you are close to a person with diabetes, please learn what to do if you find them in a coma, or having trouble with blood sugar levels. They may be confused and not know what to do. Here is an article on the subject.

My father hasn’t spoken to any of his three sisters in over 25 years. Needless to say, this has brought them all back into contact. He left yesterday to be with his family and make the funeral arrangements. Initially, he invited my sister and I to go along, but on thinking about it more, decided to go alone.

I’m thinking about him today!